BOARD-SCHOOL STUDIES.* Mn. CHARLES MORLEY'S title suggests a dry book,

but his matter is anything but dry. While School Boards and news- papers are discussing grants and conscience-clauses, and rate- payers are grudging expenditure, and old-fashioned people are deprecating the education of the lower classes above their position, he has had the happy thought to go in and out of a considerable number of actual Board-schools in the poorest and most populous districts of London and see for himself whether compulsory education is doing any good or not. The result reminds us of Dr. Johnson's saying, that whilst two people are disputing as to which is the better of two ways of teaching a child to read, a third person will find time to do it in both ways. With those unnecessarily costly ways, those unedifying controversial ways, those ways calculated to make a prig of the ingenuous gutter boy and a fine lady of the useful " general "—though he does not tell us (how could he?) that they are not going on in full force—Mr. Morley does not concern himself at all in these chapters; he tells us only of the ways of common-sense and kindness, of philanthropic enterprise and Christian painstaking, by which some of those who work the cumbrous machine contrive, in spite of the faults of the system and the bewildering din of perpetual discussion that rages round it, to snatch hundreds and thousands of small minds and souls and bodies from the clutches of that worst kind of ignorance which is the parent, as it is the offspring, of misery and crime. The papers put together in Mr. Morley's volume were published last winter in the Daily News ; they are effective pieces of journalism, but we do not doubt that they may also be accepted as faithful pictures of real episodes of London boy and girl life in school and out of it; and, as such, they are well worth the attention of all who still doubt whether a Board-school is not worse than no school at all.

A great many of the typical boys and girls to whom Mr. Morley introduces us are real characters, though, of course, they do not appear under their real names. Some are wild boys who run away from school and take up with carters and

• Studies in Board Schools. By Charles Morley. London: Smith, Elde,, sad Co. bargemen; some are really bad boys who steal, and even t, :Leh others to steal, in a systematic way; and one is a disappointed lover of fifteen who tried to commit suicide. Others, again. are heroes before they reach their teens. He talked with one

" mite of a boy " about ten years old, who was so shy and modest that he could hardly be got to talk at all, and yet he had already saved three lives :-

" Three small lives has he saved ; thrice has he plunged fearlessly into the black depths of the canal upon whose banks he resides. In fitful murmurs, with eyes cast down, he lisped un- willingly his gallant deeds into my ear. One was a boy who had sunk twice, and was just disappearing for the third and fatal time when my hero seized him by the hair, and putting forth all his strength brought him safe to the bank. How he raised him to that elevation I could not gather. Another was a foolish boy who had got out of his depths. A third was a little girl."

Another 1Y-3, who goes to the same school in Walworth as this little hero is " Citizen Carrots," a boy of twelve, who knows more about the English Constitution than most of his betters, sells newspapers in the streets from 5 o'clock in the

morning till 9 o'clock when the school-doors open, keeps the eye of a father and head-nurse combined on the boots and the manners of his younger brother, and is altogether the stay and support of a very tottering home. Mr. Morley went into school with " Carrots " after making his ac- quaintance in the street, and saw him snatch a par. donable doze during prayers, and wake up in time to say " Amen " and be all attention for the lesson on rates and taxes, which explained how he came to be so well informed about the rights and the duties of a British citizen. As Mr. Morley reports it, the lesson is a very good one; and we may take this opportunity of mentioning that this and other scenes in school are so skilfully reproduced that, without being in the least dull, they give almost as much information on all matters, from the " points " of a chameleon to the proper way of laying a dinner-table, as that friend of our youth, Enquire Within upon Everything.

The children who touch us most in the book arc the "dullards," for whom three years ago special provisions were made, at the suggestion, we understand, of General Moberly, and who are now gathered together in separate rooms of a big school in the Old Kent Road, and taught with infinite patience as much, or as little, as they can learn. As many of our readers, like Mr. Morley before he went his rounds, may not know exactly what a " dullard " is, we quote his description of this pathetic class :—

" I soon found that dullard' is only a pleasant and soothing word for something much worse than mere dulness. Besides hunchbacks, there are the partly paralysed ; there are those who can speak and won't speak, or think they can't speak; there are those with one leg shorter than the other; there are those who limp into school on crutches ; there are many who wear enormous boots which would support a giant ; there are those with heads a size too big ; and some, again, a size too little. In fact whether you take the exterior form or the inward spirit, there is present some crooked trait or other which has rendered its unhappy possessor unfit for the strife and struggle of every-day life. Wicked Fairies have hovered over their cradles as in the old, old days ; twisted this one, bent that one, physically and morally. One of them is very well known indeed—Mistress Anemia they call her—a wan, pale, shade, genius of Famine, who with clammy fingers sets her mark upon innumerable victims. But legion are the evil shapes which flit hither and thither, through the murky byways of the vast city, by day and by night, doing incredible mischief."

Thirty children, thus blighted in body or mind, or both, Mr. Morley saw gathered together in the dullards' school : the newest comers scarcely able to articulate, with no memory and no sense of responsibility. He watched them receiving an object-lesson, five minutes long—the strain of a longer effort of attention being beyond their feeble intellects—upon a chameleon, and was filled with admiration for the patience of the teacher who could smile kindly on a class whose members, when asked if they had ever seen anything like the creature before them, answered in turn, "a bunny," "a

nanny-goat," "a horse," "a monkey." Bnt he understood that patience has its reward when he went up into the

dullards' third room and saw children, originally as dim of mind as these, who had been at school for two or three years, and had reached the point of being able to write a letter to their parents, and do " string-work" that sells in the market. The practical lesson in cookery is delightfully described, and so is the "House of Four Rooms" in Bethnal Green where

little girls learn all the duties of domestic servants. Mr.

Morley describes it all in such detail that we realise how good the instruction must be to have made so distinct an impression on the visitor.

A very interesting chapter is that which tells how the writer stood in a police-court to hear the trial of a boy who had stolen money from his father. The case was a painful one. But it led to an acquaintance with a missionary who makes it his business to follow up such cases; and from him Mr.

Morley got some interesting information about the darker side of the workings of the penal clauses of the Act. The missionary admitted that the fines for non-attendance often fall cruelly upon poor parents, and that the summonses taken out by the School Board sometimes touch real tragedies. And yet he contended that very often the appearance in court proved to be the best thing that had ever happened to a poor family. This "strange paradox" Mr. Morley understood better after he had spent an afternoon in court in company with the missionary, and talked with him during the intervals between the dismissal of one " case " and the bringing on of another. While he watched " the unfolding of countless little dramas, squalid, sombre, grotesque ; listened to sin, ignorance, misery- pleading, lying," the missionary's pencil was busy taking notes, and Mr. Morley found that it was the business of his life to follow up and prevent the consequences of crime :—

" Day by day, week in and week out, month after month, year after year, he is to be found in these grim precincts, often enough from morn till eve ; and even then perhaps his work is only beginning. What tragic histories he hears ! what horrible sufferings he witnesses ! Crime, of course, is dealt with strictly, sharply, effectively. It is with the consequences of crime that the missionary has to grapple. We—that is, the world—listen to the case (or read the brief report in the papers), the prisoner is handed over to the gaoler, who claps him into the cell, and later in the day Black Maria takes him to her bosom, and we hear no more of him. But I do not doubt, for instance, that the missionary will try and ship that wicked boy to sea when he has done penance (in fact, he told me that he should do so) ; if a culprit leaves a wife and family behind him for six months, he sees what can be done to tide them over the evil time ; many a Door home he helps to keep together, even though it be with but a few twopenny sticks ; work he finds ; he intercedes with employers whose servants have pilfered or worse ; he even takes errant couples to church and gets the parson to tie the knot for nothing."

We have not space to follow Mr. Morley in detail to the Farm-House in the Borough where breakfasts and dinners are served day by day in winter to hungry children whose fathers are out of work, or to the Day Industrial School where wild boys and girls are tamed, or to the truants' school where runaway boys are kept in durance for three months. Nor have we room, alas ! for quotations that would do justice to the quaint and simple verses some of the little boys in these schools write. As might be expected, "form " is not the strong point of these compositions. But there is genuine feeling in some of them, as well as evidence of the possession of a good share of the poet's gift of direct observation. London boys, they yet write of the country as though they loved it,—one tells us, in the course of a long poem on " The Morning," that-

" Birds sing out their sweetest strains Among the hills and on the plains. The leaves of trees do seem to talk Among the grassy hills of chalk."

And another writes:—

"The leaves that rustle in the wind

Do help to lead a man that's blind."

We should not be surprised if we heard more one of these days of either of these little poets, and there is undoubtedly the making of a great " realist " in the boy who began his story of "A Midnight Murder" thus :— "The midnight policeman takes his rounds, The cat from road to area bounds, Late supper parties lay about With all the drinks of ale and stout."

What we like very much about this book is that it gives a great many glimpses of the real working of compulsory education among the poor, and brings out what is not always remembered sufficiently by those who discuss the matter in the abstract,—the human reality of the relation between the masters and the boys. It has also the merit of being very easy and entertaining reading.