iously so far accomplished as to render the completion of
the work probable.

A great trust has been confided to the officers of the Reform School;
but the power to do good is usually proportionate to the responsibility
imposed upon the laborer. In this view, much will be expected; but the
expectations formed ought not to relate so much to results as to the
wisdom and humanity with which the operations are conducted.
Massachusetts is charged with the support of a great number of
charitable and reformatory institutions. Their necessity springs from
the defects of social life; therefore their existence is a comparative
rather than a positive good; and he is the truest friend of the race who
does most to remove the causes of poverty, ignorance, insanity, mental
and physical weakness, moral waywardness, and crime.

THE CARE AND REFORMATION OF THE NEGLECTED AND EXPOSED CLASSES OF
CHILDREN.

[An Address delivered at the opening of the State Industrial School for
Girls, at Lancaster, Massachusetts.]

In man's limited view, the moral world presents a sad contrast to the
natural. The natural world is harmonious in all its parts; but the moral
world is the theatre of disturbing and conflicting forces, whose laws
the finite mind cannot comprehend. The majesty and uniformity of the
planetary revolutions, which bring day and night, summer and winter,
seed-time and harvest, know no change. Worlds and systems of worlds are
guided by a law of the Infinite Mind; and so, through unnumbered years
and myriads of years, birth and death, creation and decay, decrees whose
fixedness enables finite minds to predict the future, and rules whose
elasticity is seen in a never-ending variety of nature, all alike prove
that the sin of disobedience is upon man alone.

But, if man only, of all the varied creations of earth, may fall from
his high estate, so to him only is given the power to rise again, and
feebly, yet with faith, advance towards the Divine Excellence. This,
then, is the great thought of the occasion, to be accepted by the hearts
and illustrated in the lives of all. The fallen may be raised up, the
exposed may be shielded, the wanderers may be called home, or else this
house is built upon the sand, and doomed to fall when the rains shall
descend, the floods come, and the winds blow. The returning autumn, with
its harvest of sustenance and wealth, bids us contemplate again the
mystery and harmony of the natural world. The tr