admissible children in the county poorhouses, and requires that they be placed in family homes as soon as approved ones are found. The average American family home, especially in the country, is preferred to city homes.

When the Michigan school was opened in 1874, there were six hundred children in the state dependent on the public, most of them in the county poorhouses. There are now less than two hundred of sound mind and body in the state dependent on the public, including babes under four months. The average in the school is about one hundred and fifty, the school receiving all admissible by law. Since the school was opened, the population of the state has increased 87 per cent., while child dependence has decreased 400 per cent. in ratio to the population. There is now only one child dependent on the public in the state to each twelve thousand of the population. For over a quarter of a century in this state, child dependence has decreased as the population has increased. No state, save those acting under this system, can make such a showing.

There are other important agencies at work in Michigan to reduce child dependence. All are a part of the Michigan system. They

1. The State Board of Corrections and Charities;

2. The county agents of that board;

3. The reform schools, one for boys and one for girls; The laws for the protection of children;

5. The free treatment of dependent children at the University Hospital; and

6. The average high standard of homes in the state receiving children by indenture or adoption.

Surely, this is progress and an indorsement that might induce any state, before entering a system of child-saving, to make a careful study of the state system for the treatment of dependent and illtreated children.

Should not the state lend a hand? No interest is greater than that of the state. The character of the state is the average character of her citizens. The progress of state control is not confined to those having state homes. In different ways several prominent states have sought to stop the increase of child dependence. In Connecticut each county is required to have one or more places of refuge, temporary homes, for dependent and ill-treated children, at

least one-half mile from any penal or pauper institution, with no convict or pauper housed with them; and the children must only be retained until a family home is secured.

In New York, under the new constitution, the State Board of Charities controls the admission and time of detention of children in the subsidized sectarian asylums: In that state there are now about thirty-two thousand dependent children, one to each two hundred and twenty-five of the population, at the cost to counties and cities of about three million dollars per annum. The new law is intended to reduce child dependence.

Indiana is also attempting to control child-saving. In 1897 that state had about seventeen hundred dependent children in fifty district homes and in almshouses. That year the state established a state agency to secure homes for children. Mr. William B. Streeter, former state agent of the Michigan State Public School, was ap pointed by reason of his experience. The agency proved so successful that two additional agents have been appointed. The result, so far, is that child dependence, and the number of district homes, are on the decrease.

Ohio, with about fifty district homes and about three thousand dependent children, at an annual cost of $225,000, has before it the project of a state agent, which is urged by its Board of State Charities, because of the apparent need.

No state, according to its population, is so burdened by child dependence as California, with its three thousand dependent children. in subsidized sectarian asylums, at an expense of about three hundred thousand dollars per annum. And yet there are many in that state working hard, against adverse interests, for the appointment of a state board of charities, with the hope that it may greatly aid in reducing the ratio of child dependants to the population, which is now about the same as in New York.

New Hampshire has lately assumed state control, subsidizing sectarian charities. Whether this will increase child-dependence, as it has heretofore wherever the subsidy scheme has been established, must be told by experience.

New Jersey has assumed custody, care, and control of its dependent children by its State Board of Children's Guardians under a system of especial merit.

The United States in the District of Columbia has assumed the

expense of the care of dependent children by subsidies in sectarian asylums.

In a greater or less degree the states have awakened to the fact that the state should at least control the disposition of dependent children, in order to prevent the increase of child dependence and to secure for these children the right to family life, school, and trade education.

In 1878 M. Drouyn de Lhuys, before the Institute of France, said that the state of Michigan had preceded ancient Europe in the inauguration of a new era for dependent children.

That new era will indeed be inaugurated when all of our states shall establish state control, care, guardianship, and supervision of all dependent children within their borders.

X.

Juvenile Delinquents.

PRACTICAL THOUGHTS ON REFORMATORY

WORK.

BY JAMES ALLISON,

SUPERINTENDENT CINCINNATI HOUSE OF REFUGE, CHAIRMAN COMMITTEE JUVENILE DELINQUENTS.

Every human being is born into the world a dependent creature. It has no power of self-support. For all those things which in a general phrase we call the necessaries of life, it must be sustained by some power wholly without itself. This fact in the relation of the creature to the world about it is not a crime, it is not a fault: it is simply a condition. It is a condition which will certainly continue for years, and which may continue for a lifetime. The relationships which nature has established make incumbent on those who brought this life into the world to provide for its support and maintenance during the earlier days of its life, or indeed during its entire life, if no other provision for its care is developed or discovered.

The child is dependent. Usually, its dependence rests upon a firm and secure support. The forethought and the toil of the parent provide for the needs of its offspring until that offspring is able to sustain all the responsibilities of its existence, and the dependent becomes independent. The independent creature is self-supporting the dependent must be sustained by some power without himself. Like the two arcs of a quadrant, one is the complement of the other. The dependent condition plus the independent condition makes up the unity of life.

If, now, the power of support which sustained the dependency be removed or destroyed, the creature becomes, in the same ratio of

interference, destitute. The unsustained dependent person is the destitute person.

As there are degrees of dependency, there may be degrees of destitution. One may be destitute of proper and sufficient food, or of proper clothing, or of an appropriate shelter, or, when all the needful elements, with all the "necessaries of life," are deficient, the creature appears within the reach of our searching charities totally destitute. Total destitution may be, however, like total dependency, only a condition, not a crime. It is, in fact, only an unsatisfied dependency. Many a man has found himself in a state of temporary destitution, without food, in scanty clothing, and with nowhere to lay his head, on the morning after a destructive conflagration.

The destitution which we have referred to is a physical condition. The condition of homelessness involves something more. A person may have sufficient clothing, enough of wholesome food, a couch to lie upon, and a roof to cover him, and still be homeless. He may be, for example, not in a home, but in a prison. The true home is a moral atmosphere: homelessness is the lack of such a surrounding influence. It is not enough to say to the homeless, Be ye warmed and filled. The home life is for the soul, as food, raiment, and shelter are for the body.

Thus far we have spoken of conditions which lie without the man, affecting him deeply, seriously, but objectively.

But we are impressed with the conviction that, as the child grows up, there grows up within him, generously and abundantly, if he has been well and wisely trained, and in some degree, scantily and feebly developed it may be in those who have little training, and that perhaps of the worst, a moral activity. In each there grow the germs of truth, the knowledge of right, and the dictates and judgments of conscience. These elements of life and thought are subjective, in the child and of him. They exist in the soul of the well-developed child, and we insist that they ought to be present in the souls of even such as have opened their eyes and ears to the most debasing influences. If, searching for the germs of truth and right and justice in the soul of the child, we find them not, we count him as vile, degraded, untrustworthy. More than that, we insist that he is intrinsically vicious or criminal.

Out of our experience in the world about us, out of our inner consciousness of the life within us, assisted, many will insist, by a revela