the supervision of the treatment of the children in them, should be the main business of the officers of such Children's Homes.

2. In cities and densely-populated districts there should be established by law Industrial Homes, where older neglected and dependent children, who are wandering about unprotected but not yet habitually vicious or criminal, may be detained and educated and set to work, and kept from bad influences until homes in private families can be provided for them.

3. Houses of Refuge for boys who are already vicious or criminal, or strongly inclined to be so, but are too young to come under the discipline of criminal law, should be established in or near all large cities, and should be accessible, when needed, by children from the country districts.

4. There should be established, under the care of the State, a Reform School for boys guilty of crime or thoroughly incorrigible, which shall have in view the principle of furnishing ultimately to each boy the safeguards of home influence and work, especially work on farms or in the country, cities being avoided for such homes.

5. There should be also, under State care, a Reform School for girls who are criminal or vicious, who should be educated and trained to habits of industry, and for whom homes in private families should be provided. The treatment and reformation of this class of offenders presents, perhaps, the most difficult problem with which we have to deal; but the sole hope for them, as for all the rest, must be found in the influences of home, daily work, and moral and religious teaching, by example as well as precept.

6. Reformatories should be established by the State for younger and less hardened offenders guilty of crimes of a high grade, of which the methods and discipline should be especially directed to the reformation of the criminal. The model reformatory of this character is at Elmira, in the State of New York; and the legislation of New York upon this subject is in advance of that of all the other States. Habits of labor, especially on farms, should be formed, and homes in the country obtained for such prisoners when discharged. The object should be to reform all who can be reformed.

7. Discharged prisoners should be aided in procuring work, or they will inevitably relapse into crime; and experience shows that this is a matter of serious difficulty, which demands the supervision of the State, as well as local sympathy and aid.

8. Habitual criminals, meaning thereby those who have been repeatedly convicted of crimes of a high grade, and sentenced to imprisonment therefor, should, on being discharged from prison, be under the supervision of the police, and if found to be without visible means of support, and neglecting or refusing to work, should be sent to a workhouse, and compelled to earn a living by their own labor. This would diminish crime and pauperism very perceptibly.

9. Every able-bodied criminal convicted and sentenced to imprisonment as a punishment for crime of any grade should be compelled to earn his living by labor, instead of being supported by the honest and industrious classes; and for this purpose workhouses should be provided by the State, with farms attached to some extent as may be found advisable. This would relieve both cities and agricultural districts, to a considerable extent, of vagrants and minor offenders.

10. In addition to the provisions very generally made, and which should be universal, for the care of lunatics, the deaf and dumb, and the blind, at the public expense, there should be State institutions for the permanent care of idiots, and also similar institutions for the care of epileptics. Both of these dependent classes could do something toward their own support; and the expense of their maintenance would be no more than at present, while they would be better cared for, and the infirmaries relieved of their worst elements, and made, as they should be, comfortable homes for the aged and infirm; and the terrible demoralization and propagation of these classes that is going on in our infirmaries would be, in a measure, checked and controlled.

11. A Board of State Charities, or something analogous to it, should have a general supervision of all the penal and charitable institutions of every State, whose duty it should be to examine into their condition, and report the same to the legislature with suggestions as to their improvement; and there should also be in every county a voluntary Charity Aid Association, working in sympathy with the central Board, that shall visit periodically and be in sympathy with the officers of all infirmaries, jails, cityprisons, and other penal institutions and local public charities, and shall aid discharged prisoners in finding work. Party politics should be absolutely unknown in all such boards and associations. Good men of all parties, and women, should be interested in them; but fitness alone, meaning thereby intelligence, experience, and

high character, and not politics, should be the qualification demanded of every officer and employee in all public institutions. The public should wake up to the unmitigated evil of politics and political influences in the management of preventive, reformatory, penal, and charitable institutions.

Such are some of the conclusions to which experience has brought the Ohio Board of State Charities as to the reformatories and public charities of the State, and the direct treatment of the vicious and criminal classes in reference to the prevention of pauperism. In all cases, the best methods are in the long-run the most economical; and there is no better test of the civilization of a people than its treatment of its helpless and dependent, its vicious and criminal classes.

This committee beg leave to add a few further suggestions that seem to have a bearing upon the problem presented, to wit, the prevention of pauperism.

1. City government is a municipal, not a political, organization. So far as it is political, it perverts its powers, and becomes an abuse. It should be no more political than the government of a bank or railroad. The fact that our cities have become to a great extent nests of partisan politics, and are governed largely for the benefit of professional politicians rather than the public good, has led to an increase of vice and crime and pauperism in our large cities, that is appalling. City government in the United States, at all events in our larger cities, is a failure; and city governments generally are in sympathy with the vicious and lawbreaking classes, as far as they dare to be, for the sake of their votes. The statesman who can tell us how to govern large cities well, with universal suffrage, will render a service to his country that will rank with that of Washington who founded, and of Lincoln who saved it. If men shall fail to do the work, women may possibly be called in, as a necessity, to aid in purifying city governments. Cities are dominant in this government; and our most imminent danger now is from the vice and crime and pauperism to which their abominable misgovernment leads.

2. This is a great producing country, and if suffered to do so can supply with meat, breadstuffs, butter, cheese, iron, gold, silver, copper, cotton, petroleum, tobacco, and other products and their manufactures, the markets of half the world. What we need is access to these markets in our own vessels, in order to stimulate healthfully our agriculture, commerce, and manufactures. If, as

Lecky informs us, the union of England and Scotland, by opening up markets for the products of Scotland relieved that country of more than a hundred thousand paupers, what would a similar policy of opening up the best markets for all that we can produce in every branch of industry do for the people of the United States? This is a problem that calls for statesmanship, rather than politics.

3. Our laws for the distribution of the estates of deceased persons need to be remodelled. The principle of the French law is to limit the proportion of an estate which a testator can dispose of at his discretion by his last will and testament, and to distribute the residue of the estate absolutely among the children of the deceased, or other relatives standing in the same degree of consanguinity, equally, share and share alike. To this equal distribution of estates, more than any thing else, is probably due the fact that France is now a republic. In this country, as in England, this discretion of a testator is unlimited, thus favoring vast accumulations of wealth in single hands, rather than its distribution. Gigantic fortunes rapidly built up are no evidence of national prosperity, but rather of an unjust distribution of wealth; and such mushroom growths always imply a vast extent of surrounding pauperism. The people of the United States will not tolerate an aristocracy of blood, because they regard it as incompatible with the principles of their government; but an aristocracy of speculators, alike ignorant and unscrupulous, is growing up among us, which has all the evils of the other with none of its benefits. call our government democratic, and it is so substantially. but the danger is that in large cities its character may be changed, and, between speculators at one extreme and tens of thousands of paupers at the other, the balance of power may be sold to the highest bidder, and democratic government degenerate into demagogism tempered by bribery. The tendency of our law, like that of France, should be toward a more equal distribution of wealth, and to discourage vast accumulations in single hands.

We

4. Christianity was declared by its Founder to be glad tidings to the poor. It has no meaning but to help the helpless, and especially those of them who are trying to help themselves. A Christian Church that will not aid in this work is an impertinence, and has no right to exist. To improve the dwellings of the industrious poor; to aid them in educating their children intellectually, morally, spiritually, and in habits of industry and economy; to

extend its care to the helpless, dependent, suffering, and even the criminal classes, this is especially the mission of the Christian Church in all its branches; and it is in such works of charity and mercy, quite as much as in its preaching and praying and singing, that it is to manifest its true character. Our churches must not be so busy with their theology as to forget Christian charity.

5. Education in common schools should have in view habits of industry and economy, and the preparation of the pupil for some special trade or calling by which an honest livelihood is to be earned. There is danger that our schools, and especially our high schools, may unfit pupils for the hard work of life.

For the prevention of pauperism, then, we would recommend: 1. That all criminals sentenced to imprisonment, and all habitual criminals, shall be made to earn their living by hard work.

2. That all reformatory and preventive agencies shall, as far as possible, rest upon the cultivation of home influences and education and habits of industry.

3. That a central State Board, assisted by local boards of charities, shall have supervision of, and be in sympathy with, all prisons, jails, preventive and reformatory institutions, and all public charities in a State, with a proper classification thereof.

4. Especially do we need, for the prevention of pauperism, good city governments, access to the markets of the world in our own vessels, a more just distribution of estates by law, working rather than talking churches, and habits of industry and economy as a part of education in all classes for and in some special trade or calling.

DEBATE ON PAUPERISM.

Dr. HOYT (of New York) urged the study of out-door relief. It should be so administered as to keep people out of poorhouses: it should be given promptly, and stopped promptly. The moment the feeling of independence was broken down, a line of permanent pauperism was started. Few persons who entered the poorhouse went out of it. Thoughtless administration of relief, and easy admittance to poorhouses, resulted in successive generations of hereditary paupers.

Mr. SKINNER (of New York) spoke of the importance of inculcating in the minds of children habits of neatness and industry. In his State there were industrial schools in which the element of punishment did not figure at all. They were not reformatories,