side of
the account might have meant will never be known till the final reckoning.
The records of jails and brothels and poor-houses, for a hundred years to
come, might but have begun the tale.

When, in 1849, the Chief of Police reported that in eleven wards there
were 2,955 vagrants and dissolute children under fifteen years of age, the
boys all thieves and the girls embryo prostitutes, and that ten per cent.
of the entire child population of school age in the city were vagrants,
there was no Children's Aid Society to plead their cause. There _was_ a
reformatory, and that winter the American Female Guardian Society was
incorporated, "to prevent vice and moral degradation;" but Mr. Brace had
not yet found his life-work, and little Mary Ellen had not been born. The
story of the legacy her sufferings left to the world of children I have
briefly told, and in the chapter on Industrials Schools some of the
momentous results of Mr. Brace's devotion have been set forth. The story
is not ended; it never will be, while poverty and want exist in this great
city. His greatest work was among the homeless and the outcast. In the
thirty-nine years during which he was the life and soul of the Children's
Aid Society it found safe country homes for 84,318[22] poor city children.
And the work goes on. Very nearly already, the army thus started on the
road to usefulness and independence equals in numbers the whole body of
children that, four years before it took up its march, yielded its Lost
Tenth, as the Chief of Police bore witness, to the prisons and perdition.

This great mass of children--did they all come from the street? Not all of
them. Not even the larger number. But they would have got there, all of
them, had not the Society blocked the way. That is how the race of Topsies
has been exterminated in New York. That in this, of all fields, prevention
is the true cure, and that a farmer's home is better for the city child
that has none than a prison or the best-managed public institution, are
the simple lessons it has taught and enforced by example that has carried
conviction at last. The conviction came slowly and by degrees. The degrees
were not always creditable to sordid human nature that had put forth no
hand to keep the child from the gutter, and in the effort to rescue it now
saw only its selfish opportunity. There are people yet at this day, whose
offers to accept "a strong and handsome girl of sixteen or so with sweet
tem