[66] See Tract on "The Liquor Manufacture and Traffic," prepared by request of the National Division of the Sons of Temperance, by S. F. Cary, Most Worthy Patriarch.
[67] A year ago the schools of New York were made entirely free by law. See the foot-note on the 267th page of this work.
[68] First Annual Report of the State Superintendent (Hon. Horace Eaton) of Common Schools, made to the Legislature of Vermont, October, 1846.
[69] "School Architecture," or Contributions to the Improvement of School-houses in the United States, by Henry Barnard, Commissioner of Public Schools in Rhode Island, p. 383. This excellent treatise embodies a mass of most valuable information in relation to school-houses and apparatus. It contains the plans of a great number of the best school-houses in various portions of the United States, and should be consulted by every committee before determining upon a plan for the construction of a valuable school-house.
[70] Dumb-bells are usually made of cast iron, and sometimes of bell-metal, of the shape indicated by the figure, and should weigh from two to ten pounds each, according to the strength of the person using them.
[71] I would by no means free parents from responsibility in this matter. They, if any class, may be said to be "alone responsible;" but, in fact, all who are intrusted with the care of children share in the responsibility. Secret vice, in the opinion of those who have had occasion to remark the extent to which it is practiced, from colleges and the higher seminaries of learning down to the common school, and even in the nursery before the child is sent to school, prevails to an alarming extent. It is often the principal, and, in many instances, the sole cause of a host of evils that are commonly attributed to hard study, among which are impaired nutrition, and general lassitude and weakness, especially of the loins and back; loss of memory, dullness of apprehension, and both indisposition and incapacity for study; dizziness, affections of the eyes, headaches, etc., etc. Secret vice in childhood and youth is also a fruitful source of social vice later in life, and of excesses even within the pale of wedlock, ruinous alike to the parties themselves and to their offspring. Licentiousness in some of its forms, as we have frequently had occasion to see, from the highest testimony introduced into the text in various passages, in addition to the evils here referred to, sometimes leads to the most driveling idiocy, and to insanity in its worst forms. All, then, who have the charge of children, and especially parents and teachers, should exercise a rational familiarity with them on this delicate but important subject. They should give them timely counsel in relation to the temptations to which they may be exposed, apprise them of the evils that follow in the train of disobedience, and endeavor, by kindly advice and friendly admonition, to infix in their minds a delicate sense of honor, an abhorrence for this whole class of vice, and a determination never to entertain a thought of indulging the appetite for sex except within the pale of wedlock, and in accordance with God's own appointment.
[72] Among the many excellent works already before the public, I would name the following, which the practical teacher may profitably consult: The School and the Schoolmaster, by Dr. Potter and G. B. Emerson; Theory and Practice of Teaching, by D. P. Page; The School Teacher's Manual, by Henry Dunn; The Teacher, by Jacob Abbott; The Teacher's Manual, by Thomas H. Palmer; The Teacher Taught, by Emerson Davis; Slate and Black-board Exercises, by Wm. A. Alcott; Lectures on Education, by Horace Mann; Corporal Punishment, by Lyman Cobb; Confessions of a Schoolmaster, by Wm. A. Alcott; The Teacher's Institute, by Wm. B. Fowle; The True Relation of the Sexes, by John Ware. These are also useful to parents. A more extended list, with tables of contents, may be found in Barnard's School Architecture, p. 279 to 288.
[73] A female teacher in the Bay State, in 1847, addressed the following inquiry through the columns of the Massachusetts Common School Journal:
"I have been laboring for the last year in a large school, and have endeavored, according to the best of my ability, to inculcate habits of neatness among the pupils, especially to break them of the filthy habit of spitting upon the floor. I have often told them gentlemen never do it. But at a recent visit of the committee, an individual, who has been elected by the town to superintend the educational interests of the rising generation, spit the dirty juice of his tobacco quid upon the floor of my school-room with apparent self-complacency.