KINDERGARTEN FOR NEGLECTED CHILDREN. Address of Mrs. Sarah B. Cooper at the graduating exercises of the Pacific When the old king demanded of the Spartans fifty of their children as hostages, they replied, We would prefer to give you a hundred of our most distinguished men." This was but a fair testimony to the everlasting value of the child to any commonwealth and to any age. The hope of the world lies in the children. The hope of San Francisco's future lies in the little children that throng her streets to-day. Is it a small question, then, "What shall we do with our children?' It seems to me that the very best work that can be done for the world is work with the children. We talk a vast deal about the work of reclamation and restoration, reformatory institutions, and the like, and all this is well, but far better is it to begin at the beginning. The best physicians are not those who follow disease alone, but those who, so far as possible, go ahead and prevent it. They seek to teach the community the laws of health-how not to get sick. We too often start out on the principle that actuated the medical tyro who was working might and main over a patient who was burning up with fever. When gently entreated to know what he was doing, he snappishly replied: "Doing? I'm trying to throw him into a fit. I don't know much about curing fevers, but I'm death on fits. Just let me get him into a fit, and I'll fetch him." It seems to me we often go on the same principle-we work harder in laying plans to redeem those who have fallen than to save others from falling. We seem to take it for granted that a certain condition of declension must be reached before we can work to advantage. I repeat again what I have often said before-we do not begin soon enough with the children. It seems to me that both Church and State have yet to learn the vast import of those matchless words of the great Teacher Himself, where He said, pointing to a little child: "He that receiveth him in My name, receiveth Me." He said it because, with Omniscient vision, He saw the wondrous folded-away possibilities imprisoned within the little child. Again the great and good Teacher said: "Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones, for I say unto you that in Heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in Heaven." And when I see the neglected, sad-faced, prematurely-old, weary-eyed little ones in the purlieus of vice and crime, there is just one thought that comes like a ray of sunlight through these rifts of cloud, and it is this: There is not one of these uncombed, unwashed, untaught little pensioners of care that has not some kind angel heart that is pitying it in the heavens above. Parents may be harsh and brutal, communities may be cold and neglectful, but angels must regard them with eyes luminous with tender pity. What shall we do with these children? Good people everywhere should combine to care for them and teach them. Churches should make it an important part of their work to look after them. The State should look after them. The law of self-preservation, if no higher law, demands that they should be looked after. How shall they be looked after? We answer, by multiplying free Kindergartens in every destitute part of the city. With fifty or sixty free Kindergartens established in the most neglected districts, San Francisco would be a different city ten years hence. Said a wealthy tax-payer to me, in response to an appeal for a subscription to our Jackson-street work: "I give you this most gladly. I consider it an investment for my children. I would rather give five dollars a month to educate these children than to have my own taxed ten times the amount by and by to sustain prisons and penitentiaries." This was the practical view of a practical business man-a man of wise forethought and of generous impulses. The School Board of this city are entitled to the grateful consideration of every thoughtful citizen for their action in accepting the class of fiveyear-old children at 116 Jackson street, as an experimental Kindergarten, connected with the Public School Department. Let anybody go and examine the work for themselves. It is a sad fact that between forty and fifty just such needy children have been turned back into the street, to learn all its vice and crime, who could not find accommodation in the Silver-street Kindergarten. I tell you this is a fact of momentous import to this community. Remember that from a single neglected child in a wealthy county in the State of New York, there has come a notorious stock of criminals, vagabonds, and paupers, imperiling every dollar's worth of property, and every individual in the community. Not less than one thousand two hundred persons have been traced as the lineage of six children, who were born of this one perverted and depraved woman, who was once a pure, sweet, dimpled little child, and who, with proper influences thrown about her, at a tender age, might have given to the world twelve hundred progeny who would have blest their day and generation. Look at the tremendous fact involved! In neglecting to train this one child to ways of virtue and well-doing, the descendants of the respectable neighbors of that child have been compelled to endure the depredations, and support in alms-houses and prisons scores of her descen lants for six generations. If the citizens of San Francisco would protect the virtue of their children, their persons from murder, their property from theft, or their wealth from consuming tax to support paupers and criminals, they must provide a scheme of education that will not allow a single youth to escape its influence. And to effect the surest and best results these children must be reached just as early in life as possible. The whole effect of the Kindergarten system tends to prevent crime. And what estimate shall be placed upon an instrumentality which saves the child from becoming a criminal, and thus not only saves the State from care and expense incident to such reform, but also secures to the State all that which the life of a good citizen brings to it. Think of the vast difference in results had there been 1,200 useful, well equipped men and women at work in that county in New York, building it up in productive industries, instead of 1,200 paupers and criminals tearing down and defiling the fair heritage! We have but to look at this significant fact to estimate the value of a single child to the commonwealth. The true Kindergartner proceeds upon the principle asserted by Froebel, that every child is a child of Nature, a child of man, and a child of God, and that education can only fulfill its mission when it views the human being in this three-fold relation and takes each into account. In other words, the true Kindergartner regards with scrupulous care the physical, the intellectual, the moral. "You can not," says Froebel, "do heroic deeds in words, or by talking about them; but you can educate a child to self-activity and to well-doing, and through these to a faith which will not be dead.' The child in the Kindergarten is not only told to be good, but inspired by help and sympathy to be good. The Kindergarten child is taught to manifest his love in deeds rather than words, and a child thus taught never knows lip-service, but is led forward to that higher form of service where his good works glorify the Father, thus proving Froebel's assertion to be true, where he says: "I have based my education on religion, and it must lead to religion." We seem to forget that the moral powers, like the physical and mental, can only be strengthened by exercise. What the work most needs to-day is to bring more of the true Sabbath into the week-day-in individual life, in family life, in social life, in business life, and in national life. The school should cultivate with equal skill the perceptive and the reflective faculties, the intellect, and the conscience. All training should tend to repress the lower nature and arouse the higher. It should regulate the animal forces so that they should minister to the spiritual, thus becoming the faithful servitors of all that is highest and noblest within the little child. And this is the mission of every true Kindergartner. This is to be your mission, my dear young ladies-you who go forth to practice and teach the principles of your Master Froebel. Like him, you must love the little ones whom you seek to unfold. Like him, you must wrap a warm heart of love about them, and love them into goodness. Are you ready for the work? It means much of toil and self-sacrifice; it means much of patience and care; it means much of weariness and discouragement; it means much of self-renunciation and self-conquest. One must be as patient as Penelope at her web, and as tender as true motherhood, to evoke the good and check the bad in these little neglected pensioners of poverty and want. There must be a magnetic attractiveness that charms while it compels. There must be a deep-sighted sympathy, which is wiser than all blame, and more potent than all reproof. There must be an abiding faith in the loving care of an Almighty Friend, in whose help and strength the patient toiler goes forward, day by day, feeling that, after all, the richest reward of such a life is to live it. I wish every Christian philanthropist in the city would move toward the care and training of these luckless little children. I wish every church in San Francisco would establish and carry forward one free Kindergarten. There need then be no restraint in regard to foundationwork in moral and religious training-not necessarily sectarian_training, but good, sound, fundamental Christian training. There could then be thousands of these little waifs under daily instruction; kept from the pernicious influences of the streets, and taught all that is good and true and pure and right and kind and noble. They could be taught industry and order and neatness. They could be taught reverence and self-respect. They could be taught in the midst of poverty and struggle to put their trust in a Heavenly Friend, who with unspeakable tenderness said: 'Suffer the little children to come unto Me." Could Christian philanthropy devise a better or more promising work than this? It reaches down to the very foundations upon which true character may be built. It is full of promise and fruition of hope and reward. It is a work that appeals to parentage. When fathers and mothers see the faces of their own darlings radiant with unalloyed happiness, would it not be well to turn a tender thought on these luckless little ones, left in the world with none to call them by dear names, and none to be thoughtful of their pressing wants, with nothing to relieve the sad monotony of the days and weeks and months of their spare and scanty lot. I have an idea that in proportion as we seek to bless these hapless children we may expect blessing upon our own. That in proportion as we give to these children we keep for our own. Verily, it is so. "Then whispered the Angel of Mothers 'In blessing the children of others You are garnering joys for your own.'" THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN. Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, They are leaning their young heads against their mother's, The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, The young birds are chirping in the nest, The young fawns are playing with the shadows, The young flowers are blowing toward the west, But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free.-Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. ANALOGIES OF TONE AND COLOR. READ BY PROF. D. BATCHELLOR, OF BOSTON, BEFORE THE AMERICAN FRÖBEL UNION, MARCH 1879. On the Use of Color in Teaching Children to Sing. In our day there is a growing tendency to look at the arts and sciences in their relation one to another. The past age was mainly one of analysis, in which each seeker selected his own special study, and directed all his energies to find out the truth of that particular thing. In this way, a vast number of facts were observed, and underlying laws brought to light. The work is not by any means complete, and many earnest minds are still following up the separate paths of scientific discovery. But from the treasures already lying before them, some of our thinkers are now trying to deduce general principles, so as to arrive ultimately at the universal truth, of which all created things are but forms of expression. It is everywhere seen that however complicated the details of any art may be, its fundamental laws are few and simple. The sculptor finds that beneath all the manifold changes of form, there can be but three ultimate principles; his surfaces must be either convex, concave, or plane. The musician may exhaust his ingenuity to produce the most varied musical effects; but all possible combinations fall back upon three tones, and these at last merge into one-the key-tone of music. The painter may revel in endless effects of shade, tint, and hue; but they are all based upon three primary colors, and indeed, many suppose these to be only different degrees of one-the primal red. And not only do we find that the fundamental principles of each art are few and simple, but we also begin to perceive that a common relationship subsists between them-that the elements of one are mystically joined to all. No one art stands alone and separate from the rest, for each is allied to and dependent upon the others. Just as recent discoveries have shown that there is no clear boundary line between mineral, vegetable, and animal organizations, so if we look beneath the surface and study deeply into any art, we shall find it insensibly blending into the other arts. This is especially the case with the kindred arts of music and painting. Probably there are not many persons among those who have given the subject a moment's attention but do somehow feel that there is a mystic relation between colors and tones. It is true that their ideas upon the subject are too vague and shadowy to be grasped in thought; but this is because they do not understand the relation of either tone or color to the mind. It is the writer's purpose to look into the matter a little more closely, to see whether this general consciousness is confirmed by systematic observation. And first we will turn our attention to the effect which musical tones produce upon the mind. Music has been well defined as the language of emotion; but the knowledge of how and why it appeals to the emotions has been hitherto confined to the few who were gifted with rare musical insight, and even in their case, it is doubtful if it has not been more a matter of intuition than of understanding. The ordinary teaching of this emotional language has been entirely empirical, being, in its earlier and more important stages, a stereotyped routine of mechanical drilling, about equally wearisome and unprofitable. The philosophic method of instruction would be to find out the central fact or root-principle of music, and then, having implanted it in the student's mind, to let it develop itself naturally, taking on signs-i. e. notation— as it needed visible embodiment. Instead of a method like this, the student is set to study a complicated set of signs, which are nothing, after all, but the accidental surroundings of music. A noble exception, however, to the general rule is to be found in the Tonic Sol-fa Method, which has been so successful in England. This system from the beginning and throughout clearly sets forth the fundamental principle of key-relationship;-i. e., the relation which each. tone of the scale bears to its key-tone. The thorough application of this principle led to another very interesting discovery. In comparing these tones one with another, and observing how the composers used them in their works, the tonic sol-faists found that each tone had a distinct character, and produced an impression upon the mind peculiar to itself. Thus the key-tone gives the impression of firmness and strength. The ear is filled with it at the commencement; we want to hear it frequently in the course of the music, and if it did not come in at the close, the mind would be kept waiting in suspense for a more restful finish. This is the foundation tone of musical structure; but although it is essential to every tune, and lies firmly imbedded in the harmony, it does not necessarily arrest the attention of the listener. More often, like the strong foundations of a building which are buried out of sight, the tone produces an unconscious impression of strength and satisfaction. This strong tone, however, is quite noticeable in melodies of a bold character, e. g. :— And in the following example the tone happily expresses confident assurance: I know that my re deem · er liveth. |