their numbers are not great; nor are they so nearly all of one sex as commonly alleged. The statements that lewd girls so often make in regard to the manner in which their innocence was betrayed are sometimes true, as dicers' oaths are sometimes true; and the stories that lunatics relate as to treatment received from their keepers are sometimes true; but more generally the whole narrative is substantially false.

The ranks of abandoned women that so infest all our towns and cities are mainly recruited from the abodes of poverty and crime, where vice already has at least partial possession. Little boys and girls are reared on back streets and dark alleys, or in squalid neglect elsewhere, without the least restraint, and with all possible evil example before them, many of them never having heard of virtue, and not knowing of its existence. As the girls grow up they acquire feminine grace of person, and the boys steal on their behalf and on their own. The means of fashionable attire are at last obtained, and a course of criminal life is fully established. The young courtesan, having thus entered upon her career, goes forth to prey upon mankind. The admitted fact that her victims are often as bad as herself does not in the least diminish the obligations of society to check the evil.

The victims of their own faults, by reason of the strange woman, are more numerous than from all other casualties, including war and pestilence; and, taking the whole world and all historic times into view, the victims of intemperance, thickly as their bones strew the valley of death, are relatively few compared with those to whom the wise man in proverb referred when, intending to sum up all the horrors, he said, "Yea, many strong men have been slain by her, and her house is the way to hell, going down to the chamber of death." From her destruction no whole classes of men escape. Prophets and priests, nobles, senators and kings, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, alike, are among those who have met thus with worse than death, and death also. Among all the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats,' there are no diseases that afflict the human family that are so severe or so deadly as those, by which God makes, in this respect, the way of the transgressor hard, whether man or woman; vitiating the blood often for many generations after the offence has been committed, it attests to children's children, though happily they do not always know it, the fearful outrage that had been com. mitted against their nature before they had any being.

The great number of wanton women and girls abroad make it very dangerous for your sons in all their necessary walks and journeys in the business of their lives. Such, in this country, is the chivalrous regard for and devotion to the protection of modest women, that one of your daughters may travel by night and day with almost complete safety throughout the entire extent of the great country. Molestations and outrages sometimes occur, but very rarely; and danger, or even the appearance of it, is not often to be apprehended. On the contrary, one of your sons is never free from danger under similar circumstances, by highway, railway or steamer, walking to business, or returning from church; near home, or in distant States; the net, often not in vain, is spread plainly in his sight. Endowed with instincts and passions that Nature transmits with more certainty than she bestows sight or hearing or any other sense, how shall he escape, if legislators and lawgivers will make no attempt to restrain and virtuously rear the great number of neglected female children that annually grows into and from mere destitution swells the number of those to whom we refer?

"What shall we do," writes a citizen of Baltimore, "to protect the sixty thousand young men and youths of our city from the two or three thousand immoral girls that are so diligent in temptation?”

It is not the project of prisons for females, much as they are needed in many States, and certainly as they must be had, that we wish to press upon your attention here and now. It is not for a place to confine, restrain, and punish those whose fixed manner of life is thought by some good people, and almost always thought by the unfortunates themselves, to be hopeless of amendment, and to admit of no remedy after a criminal record had been made in the courts; but we urge upon you, who so closely represent the people here, the necessity of providing shelter and refuge for the very young girls that are exposed, in behalf of whom there is the most ample encouragement for the interposition of restraining influences, and such substitutes for good homes as, to the homeless, may have many of the attributes of real good homes; where education, good examples, industrious habits, loving sympathy, religious observances, may all combine to give a new and upward tendency to a course that may have already begun to acquire momentum in the direction of irretrievable disaster.

Your reader, at the last session of the Michigan Legislature, prepared, and caused to be introduced, a bill to appropriate twenty

thousand dollars to commence the construction of a State Refuge for girls between the ages of ten and fourteen years. An establishment was proposed within very moderate expense, and for a class of girls restricted to ages within which the most distrustful of men would concede the great probability of doing good. The bill passed the House with a large majority, but failed in the Senate. The Senators nearly all favored the provisions of the bill, but were unwilling to add to the list of appropriations, already so large, for public buildings, at that session. I remarked to one of the Senators that the money was thus saved to the treasury in one sense, yet I feared it would cost the State more than twenty thousand dollars per year to do without the use of it in the manner proposed.

Many of the States that have made advance in charitable institutions have reformatories for young girls; and in the attempted good education of them, as well as of the boys, they meet with a high degree of success, and with many failures, as other parents do in the best-regulated families with children generally. But the duty in either case is none the less apparent or incumbent; and we may here quote to such States as are deficient in this particular, and to such persons as are incredulous of the possibility of doing good in this direction, the words that were by Divine inspiration addressed to mankind:

"As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child; even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all. In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand; for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good."

DEBATE ON MR. LORD'S REPORT.

MR. LETCHWORTH (of New York) heartily commended Mr. Lord's able paper. It was gratifying for him to see that in Michigan it had been demonstrated that the gloomy prison built for the incarceration of the hardened criminal was not necessary for the child, and that it had done away with these strong barriers and walls about its reform school. He hoped the example would be followed elsewhere, and that no boy should be degraded by unnecessary severity in the effort to reclaim him. The boy should be treated as a boy, and the man as a man; their different natures considered, and greater mercy extended to erring childhood.

While the State assumes to act in loco parentis, it should exercise toward the child the parental attributes in the way of gentler treatment, guidance, and admonition, rather than the discipline designed for the adult criminal who has reached the years of responsibility and judgment. Home life should, as far as practicable, be made a feature of all institutions having the care or reformation of children.

In regard to the class of girls mentioned, the work, as Mr. Lord had ably shown, was one of pressing importance. The idea had forced itself upon his mind, that it was pre-eminently a woman's work; and so far as his observation went it had been more successful in their hands. He hoped that in this field woman's efforts would be exercised to the fullest extent possible, by such methods as her peculiar tact and knowledge of her own sex suggested as most feasible.

Mr. Letchworth then alluded briefly to the children's work in New York State. He said that in a general visitation made in 1875, there were a hundred and thirty-six institutions for the care of children, all of which, with the exception of two, he had personally visited. 17,791 children were cared for, including the dependent, delinquent, and defective classes, aside from those receiving aid through newsboys' lodging-houses and industrial schools. A large work in this direction was also being carried on, chiefly in New York and Brooklyn. In addition to the aid afforded by the State, large amounts were annually contributed by the benevolent in the carrying-on of this work. Mr. Letchworth then exhibited some large photographic views of the buildings of the Nursery and Child's Hospital, New York, and its country branch at Staten Island, with its beautiful cottages; also the ground plans of their construction and the laying out of the grounds; and explained the successful workings of this noble charity, which is still under the efficient direction of its founder, Mrs. Cornelius Du Bois.

MR. MURRAY SHIPLEY, president of the Children's Home of Cincinnati, said, "We do the same work in our Home as is done in similar institutions elsewhere. We obtain our children by becoming acquainted with the poor, by knowing those to whom our help should be given, by the poor gaining confidence in our institution. We have now four boys to one girl inmate. The reason of this seems to be that young boys are a trouble to their poor mothers, while a young girl is her companion and assistant, and is therefore kept at home. The greater part of the children received are be

tween two and eight years. Why? Because the mother cannot go out to work with them at home, or, if she wants to marry again, they are in the way. I think one of the dangers of these institutions is the tendency to break up the family relation, by giving parents an opportunity to rid themselves of their children. I think a great deal of harm has been done in our work by trying to paint all things in the color of the rose, and make all things bright. I approve of Mr. Letchworth's idea not to have high walls around our institutions. The number of children in the Home Jan. 1, 1877, was 58; number admitted that year, 211; number re-admitted, 124. Many people would say the number of re-admissions was a blot on the work, but it is not so. Perhaps we have an application for a child from an old-fashioned man and wife: we send them a bright young fellow; he is too smart for them, and back comes a letter saying, 'We don't want your boy.' We take the boy back, and send out instead a slow, plodding boy, and receive an answer that he is a splendid boy.' We sometimes send a boy out five or six times; and such a boy is sometimes the best and most intelligent of them all. We seek to place the right children in the right place.

MRS. LOUISE ROCKWOOD Wardner. - It was not my intention, when I came to attend this meeting, to make any report. I thought to sit humbly at the feet of wisdom, and gain information from the many savants and eminent philanthropists here assembled. But as I have, since my arrival, received credentials as a delegate from the Woman's Social Science Association of Illinois, and a most earnest request that I should report the progress of our Industrial School for Girls, I improve this opportunity you have so kindly given me, with great diffidence. After hearing Dr. Hoyt's remarks on Tuesday, I felt impelled to say something in regard to the dependent and homeless girls of my own State, and to tell of what we were trying to accomplish for their good. I find, on investigation, that the subject of industrial education for dependent children, particularly for girls, has received comparatively little attention. There had been established, up to 1876, thirty reform and industrial schools in nineteen of the States of the Union, the remaining States and Territories having no such institutions.

I find that the slight provision already made for reformation is for boys mainly. Fifteen of these reformatory institutions are for boys only; four for girls only; and eleven for boys, with a small department for girls; and in many of these (as in our own State