d
open. We know no sect or race. Both Catholic and Protestant homes were
offered freely to the children. No child's creed was interfered with. On
the committees themselves in the Western villages have frequently been
Roman Catholics. Notwithstanding this, the cry of "proselytizing" is
still kept up among the guides of the poor against this most humane
scheme, and continually checks our influence for good with the younger
children, and ultimately will probably diminish to a great degree the
useful results we might accomplish in this direction.

The experience we have thus had for twenty years in transferring such
masses of poor children to rural districts is very instructive on the
general subject of "Emigration as a cure for Pauperism."

CHAPTER XXI.

RESULTS AND FACTS OF EMIGRATION TO THE WEST.

OUR FIRST EMIGRANT PARTY. (FROM OUR JOURNAL.)

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BY A VISITOR.
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"On Wednesday evening, with emigrant [Since this first experience, we
have always sent our children by regular trains, in decent style.]
tickets to Detroit, we started on the _Isaac Newton_ for Albany. Nine of
our company, who missed the boat, were sent up by the morning cars, and
joined us in Albany, making forty-six boys and girls from New York,
bound westward, and, to them, homeward. They were between the ages of
seven and fifteen--most of them from ten to twelve. The majority of them
orphans, dressed in uniform--as bright, sharp, bold, racy a crowd of
little fellows as can be grown nowhere out of the streets of New York.
The other ten were from New York at large--no number or street in
particular. Two of these had slept in nearly all the station-houses in
the city. One, a keen-eyed American boy, was born in Chicago--an orphan
now, and abandoned in New York by an intemperate brother. Another, a
little German Jew, who had been entirely friendless for four years, and
had finally found his way into the Newsboys' Lodging-house. Dick and
Jack were brothers of Sarah, whom we sent to Connecticut. Their father
is intemperate; mother died at Bellevue Hospital three weeks since; and
an older brother has just been sentenced to Sing Sing Prison. Their
father, a very sensible man when sober, begged me to take the boys
along, 'for I am sure, sir, if left in New York, they will come to the
same bad end as their