, the women lazy, quarrelsome, and given to
begging; the children see nothing but examples of drunkenness, lust, and
idleness, and they grow up inevitably as sharpers, beggars, thieves,
burglars, and prostitutes. Amid such communities of outcasts the
institutions of education and religion are comparatively powerless. What
is done for the children on one sacred day is wiped out by the influence
of the week, and even daily instruction has immense difficulty in
counteracting the lessons of home and parents.

For such children of the outcast poor, a more radical cure is needed
than the usual influences of school and church.

The same obstacle also appeared soon with the homeless lads and girls
who were taken into the Lodging-houses. Though without a home, they were
often not legally vagrant--that is, they had some ostensible occupation,
some street-trade--and no judge would commit them, unless a very
flagrant case of vagrancy was made out against them. They were unwilling
to be sent to Asylums, and, indeed, were so numerous that all the
Asylums of the State could not contain them. Moreover, their care and
charge in public institutions would have entailed expenses on the city
so heavy, that tax-payers would not have consented to the burden.

The workers, also, in this movement felt from the beginning that
"asylum-life" is not the best training to outcast children in preparing
them for practical life. In large buildings, where a multitude of
children are gathered together, the bad corrupt the good, and the good
are not educated in the virtues of real life. The machinery, too, which
is so necessary in such large institutions, unfits a poor boy or girl
for practical handwork.

The founders of the Children's Aid Society early saw that the best of
all Asylums for the outcast child, is the _farmer's home._

The United States have the enormous advantage over all other countries,
in the treatment of difficult questions of pauperism and reform, that
they possess a practically unlimited area of arable land. The demand for
labor on this land is beyond any present supply. Moreover, the
cultivators of the soil are in America our most solid and intelligent
class. From the nature of their circumstances, their laborers, or
"help," must be members of their families, and share in their social
tone. It is, accordingly, of the utmost importance to them to train up
children who shall aid in their work, and be associates of their own
childre