What Seventy Boys Became.
By E. Lawton
MANY people begin the education of their children with an exhibition of toys, marvelous tales, silly romances, and wind up with the circus and theater. The degrading influence and sorrowful consequences of this mode of education will be best illustrated by stating a few facts that have passed under my own observation. So far as my memory goes, about thirty boys educated in this way, that is, in contempt of all useful knowledge and occupation, spent their days in reading novels, the lives and confessions of pirates, murderers, &c., and their nights in the streets, dram-shops, gambling-saloons, circus, and theater; at the age of forty-five, one had been hung for murder, one for robbing the mail, and three as pirates; five died in the penitentiary, and seven lived and died as useless vagabonds about the streets; three were useful mechanics, and the fate of the remainder is unknown. Of about forty educated with me by a really moral and scientific teacher, under the old fogy, Puritanic system of restraint, as it is now called by Young America, at the age of fifty-five, one was a member of Congress, one judge of the Supreme Court, two judges of the Circuit Court, three physicians, five lawyers, fourteen were dead, and the remainder farmers and mechanics, and, so far as known, not one of them ever was called before the bar of his country on a criminal charge, and they all had comfortable homes, except two or three, and every one was passably respectable. Dr. E. Lawton.