per," as a cheap substitute for a paid servant--"an angel with mighty
strong arms," as one of the officers of the Society indignantly put it
once--show that the selfish stage has not been quite passed. Such offers
are rejected with the emphatic answer: "We bring the children out because
they need you, not because you need them." The Society farms out no girls
of sixteen with strong arms. For them it finds ways of earning an honest
living at such wages as their labor commands, homes in the West, if they
wish it, where good husbands, not hard masters, are waiting for them. But,
ordinarily, its effort is to bend the twig at a much tenderer age. And in
this effort it is assisted by the growth of a strong humane sentiment in
the West, that takes less account of the return the child can make in work
for his keep, and more of the child itself. Time was when few children but
those who were able to help about the farm could be sure of a welcome.
Nowadays babies are in demand. Of all the children sent West in the last
two years, 14 per cent. were under five years, 43.6 per cent. over five
and under ten years, 36.8 per cent. over ten and under fifteen, and only
5.3 per cent. over fifteen years of age. The average age of children sent
to Western homes in 1891 by the Children's Aid Society was nine years and
forty days, and in 1892 nine years and eight months, or an average of nine
years, four months, and twenty days for the two years.

It finds them in a hundred ways--in poverty-stricken homes, on the Island,
in its Industrial Schools, in the street. Often they are brought to its
office by parents who are unable to take care of them. Provided they are
young enough, no questions are asked. It is not at the child's past, but
at its future, that these men look. That it comes from among bad people is
the best reason in the world why it should be put among those that are
good. That is the one care of the Society. Its faith that the child, so
placed, will respond and rise to their level, is unshaken after these many
years. Its experience has knocked the bugbear of heredity all to flinders.

So that this one condition may be fulfilled, a constant missionary work of
an exceedingly practical and business-like character goes on in the
Western farming communities, where there is more to eat than there are
mouths to fill, and where a man's children are yet his wealth. When
interest has been stirred in a community to the point of arousing demands