its young men are in such demand that the farm of the institution itself has to be worked with youthful hands of which the vigour hardly comes up to the goodwill; and all this is effected at so small a cost, indeed necessity is here as elsewhere the mother of invention, if the parsimonious farmers and peasantry of Flanders saw their youthful poor maintained on the same footing as at Mettray, they would burn the buildings, and stone the director. But I am satisfied that in the long run Mettray will be found the cheaper system; for, as I have shown in my description of that establishment, it contains within itself the elements of reproduction: it would be invidious to cite names of persons as being qualified to succeed M. De Metz, but there they are, selected, trained, exercised for the purpose of commanding as chiefs, and not merely assisting as subalterns; much of the extra expense is caused by this very element in the system; and the nearer approach to self government through a body of elective elder brothers will make the task of the successor all the easier; but what is to become of Ruysselede should M. Pol be removed? Why is St. Hubert, the other great Belgian reformatory, a failure? ls some one of the untiring camels, that I saw performing their never-ending tasks with so much patience, suddenly to be endued with the vigour and paces of the war horse? Go to Ruysselede, observe it minutely, study it carefully, no chapter of practical wisdom will better repay the study, but beware of its self-consuming penny policy.

From Ruysselede we went to the girls school at Beernem, which is conducted by sisters of charity, under the same director and chaplain as the boys' establishment at Ruysselede, of which it is in fact the complement, and is conducted on exactly the same plan with such alterations as are dictated by the difference of sex the boys do themasonry, joiners' work, and the like of the female establishment, and the girls are to do the washing and the like for the male establishment. The superintendent sister conducted us over the buildings, which were admirable in arrangement and of the most scrupulous cleanliness and neatness; time forbids my entering into details, but the only points for criticism that the scrutinising eyes of some of us could detect were the use of the same room as refectory and chapel, and the absence of the provisions for regular bathing that we found at the boys' establishment. The instruction is in reading, writing, and arithmetic, sewing,

spinning, knitting, washing, getting up linen, simple cottage cookery, the management of the farm-yard and cow-house, and the cultivation of the kitchen garden. There we saw them all silently at work learning to be farm servants, and in due time to bless the homely store of the Flemish peasant, not qualifying themselves to inundate the world with a deluge of nursery governesses. On the whole they looked less sprightly than the boys; how should this be? Is it that working in silence is less congenial to the female nature? Or has the fact that they have no instrumental music something to do with it? It is, to say the least, a singular coincidence that of all the reformatory institutions which I have visited, those only can be said to be absolutely successful in which a prominent place is given to instrumental music. Is not the secret to be found in the words put by an acute observer of human nature in the mouth of his itinerant exhibitor of horsemanship-" People must be amused. They can't be always a-learning, nor yet they can't be always a working, they arn't made for it. You must have us, Squire. Do the wise thing and the kind thing too, and make the best of us; not the worst."*

Of the results of the girls' institution, at Beernem, I cannot speak, for it has only just been established; but with all my difference of creed, I cannot for a moment doubt but that a blessing will attend the faithful labors of those unpretending sisters.

I must reserve for some other occasion my visits to Reformatories in our own country. I can assure you that private zeal has made some glorious beginnings in England, but, for want of legislative sanction, these have hitherto worked at great disadvantage, and nevertheless, with great success, for if at Ruysselede the demand for young sailor-boys exceeds the supply, so at Red Hill the demand for farm-servants in the colonies exceeds the supply. Our Parliament has, in the act which I referred to at the beginning of the lecture, taken a long step in support of the movement, and no one can now pretend that the grand undertaking of reclaiming thousands of spirits run to waste wants the sanction of the law, or such facilities as mere law can afford.

There is the law, the money will not be wanting. Where are the men? Let no persons presume to say 66 we are the men,' without counting the cost, without feeling the mission. Hard

work, constant anxiety, small pay, no promotion, little worldly esteem, a life spent in the noiseless routine of subordinate duties, and, as regards temporal prosperity, continuing and ending just where it began, such is the prospect; ambition, love of distinction, comfort, wealth, spirits of the earth earthy, will find no resting place there: but I cannot believe that the land of Sunday School teachers will not produce also some of those more sublime self-devotions that are called for by the work that we are at last thinking to take in hand.

In more poetical times I should now have concluded with some classical allusion, some apposite illustration embodied in immortal verse, some fable pregnant with its moral. But at a time when writers are found who can speak of descriptions in Homer as disgusting, when we are absolutely bound up in facts, facts, all facts, nothing but facts, I will conclude with a fact, a dry fact, a fact which you may all of you verify at six o'clock to morrow morning, but a fact pregnant with its

moral.

About a mile to the E., perhaps E. S. E., of the place in which I am addressing you, there is and for a long time has been a large factory, but not for one of the staple industries of the town, it is in fact a silk mill. If you enquire into the history of that mill, you will find that formerly in preparing the raw silk for exportation from the countries in which the raw silk is produced, there was a large quantity of refuse which was thrown away as useless. It occurred however to the enterprising mind of our fellow townsman that even this refuse was rich in silky fibre, the extraction of which might possibly pay he tried the experiment in that very mill, and carried it out with such success that the Italian states, in which this material was formerly thrown away as refuse, have now imposed a duty on the export, and such of you as visited the Great Exhibition in 1851 can answer the question, whether the spun silk of our friend Mr. Holdforth was second to any other in that vast collection.

My friends, let but the proper machinery be applied by the proper hands, and of the very refuse of our population, of the youths that people our prisons, that infest our streets, that desecrate our sabbaths, you will, by God's blessing, work up a large proportion into fair average members of those most important branches of society, the hardy, intelligent emigrant, the skilful sturdy mariner, the bold industrious peasant.