jected. There is a degree of restraint and coercion, which cannot be dispensed with in schools; and in reconciling the minds of this little flock to something so opposite to the unrestrained idleness in which they have hitherto been indulged, the visits of a person who has had no previous bias, and the impartial interference of such a character as the resident clergyman of the parish, must have the best and most salutary effects.

In supplying the idle with employment, and in seducing them to take the benefit of it, it frequently occurs that the industrious are checked in their exertions, and prejudiced in their means of life. When, for example, the needlework of a district is engrossed by a parish workhouse or by a charitable school, and the work is to be disposed of to the neigh bourhood at an underprice, the solitary semp stress, who has been striving to maintain herself by being useful and industrious in her own cottage, is thereby deprived of her livelihood, and is reduced to the degraded situation of a pauper. This is an evil, which is more or less incidental to every plan for employing the poor, except in those cases,

where new occupation is devised and introduced. Such, in an eminent degree, is the manufacture of split straw; which, while it gives food and employment to the idle and unoccupied, does not interfere with any means of subsistence, which the industrious and well disposed do at present enjoy.

The objection* to split straw, as a durable and permanent article of manufacture, has been already noticed in the Reports. There seems no reason to apprehend the discontinuance of the material, as an object for fashion to mould and shape into all its variety of fickle and capricious forms. Let us, however, for a moment imagine that, after the prevalence of a few years, it may go into disuse. If in the interval (and I will calculate upon even so short a term as five years) we can make it the instrument of giving instruction to the rising generation, and of education of a succession children, for five

*See Report, No. CVI.-The manufacture of split straw is making a considerable progress at present, and that of the Leghorn platt is already begun by Mr. Corston, who has five acres of very promising Leghorn wheat, near Swaffham, in Norfolk, for the express purpose of this manufacture. It cannot be too frequently noticed, that we should endeavour to make the straw manufacture, the means of education for the young, and of occupation to infirm persons who are not fit for other work.

years only, in habits of order, cleanliness, application, and usefulness, it will confer on this country one of the most important advantages it has ever received.

No. XIII.

INDUSTRY SCHOOL AT BIRMINGHAM.

THz expediency of separating the children'

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of the poor, from those depraved and incorrigible persons who too frequently form the population of a parish workhouse, had induced the overseers and guardians of the poor at Birmingham, to place such as were from four to ten years of age, with nurses in the neighbouring villages. This however was attended with some inconveniences. The attention of the overseers and guardians was then directed to another object. A large building, about a mile from the town, was vacant. This suggested the formation of a separate establishment; and an offer having been made by some of the guardians to conduct it, the new establishment commenced in July 1797.

A matron was appointed; who, with a school master and mistress and one female servant, formed the household. The elder girls have assisted in cleaning the rooms, making Reports No. CXXIII.

the beds, &c. a kind of employment, which, while it ministers to general economy, improves them all in a most useful branch of domestic education. The girls have been taught to read; and have been employed in knitting, needlework, &c. for the asylum and the workhouse, and for respectable families; and such credit have they had for the manner in which their work has been done, that more has been sent them than they have been able to execute.

In summer, the boys have been occasionally sent to labour in the farms and gardens, in the vicinity of the Asylum, and to weed and pick stones. The produce of this, with the work of the girls, has formed a little fund, which has enabled the Committee to build a shop;* where forty boys are employed by a pin-maker to head the pins, and stick them in papers in rows. By the further increase of this source of labour, they have also built another room, where forty girls are employed by a respectable draper, in platting straw for ladies' hats and bonnets. The overseers and guardians are

*The profit of these children's work, from January, 1800, to July, 1804, has been 5761. 4s. 4d.;-the expenditure in building, repairs, &c. 3481. 10s. 7d.;-leaving a balance in the Treasurer's hands, in July, 1804, of 235l. 10s. 9d.

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