In order that it may actually be an advantage to the child to learn to read in the school, it is of importance that when it leaves the school it may find something good to read—something improving for the understanding, something ennobling for the heart. Rich men’s children have this in superabundance: the children of the poor have long had, and still in many countries have—when they leave school—no other reading of an amusing kind to go to than wretched ballads, rude stories, immoral tales and pictures, which degrade mind and taste—and they form themselves accordingly. In England, and in various cultivated countries, people have begun zealously to provide for the needs of the reading portion of the lower classes. Societies have been formed both in the Episcopal church and other religious bodies, for the diffusion of useful and entertaining reading, designed especially for the youth of the lower classes who have the wish to read, but who have not the means of purchasing expensive books. Small works, illustrated with beautiful vignettes, circulate in England by thousands, especially narratives, biographies, and such like, which are calculated to please the most uneducated as well as the most childish mind. The number of these writings, and so called “tracts”—which are sold at from one penny to six-pence each—is immense in England. They circulate over the whole country, and may be met with in all the book-shops. In the Ragged Schools, in the Model Boarding-houses, in the Home for poor emigrants, in the Dormitory for thieves, in many benevolent institutions, had I seen a copper-plate portrait of a handsome, middle-aged gentleman, holding a roll of paper in his hand, from which he seemed about to read. This was the portrait of Lord Ashley, now Earl of Shaftesbury. It was thus that he stood up, time after time, in Parliament, with narratives which he had collected and written down from the life of the working-classes of England, with its neglects and necessities, its temptations to crime, and its bitterness against society, especially in the manufacturing districts. It was thus that he continued to stand forth and to plead, spite of opposition, derision, reproach, and threats, until he aroused that universal attention and that universal sympathy for the sufferings of the lower classes of society, which he made it his mission to search into and to alleviate. Thus, he became the promoter of important reforms, and of many excellent institutions for the oppressed and the fallen of the laboring classes. Thus, he became so well known for his spirit of active human kindness, that not long since, the thieves of London, to the number of more than a thousand—if I am not mistaken—sent to Lord Ashley, requesting he would meet them at a certain place which they named, where they wished to ask his advice, as to how they might get into some better way of life. Lord Ashley undertook to meet these thieves. These dangerous classes had laid