nt to England in 1877, after her mother`s death, Dr.
Garran wrote to me for some account of our methods, and of their
success, physical, moral, and financial. Dr. Garran came out with Mr.
G. F. Angas and the Australian Constitution in 1851 in search of health
and work, both of which he found here. The first pages of my four
volumes of newspaper cuttings are filled with two long articles, "The
Children of the State," and this started the movement in New South
Wales, led by Mrs. Garran, nee Sabine, and Mrs. Jefferis wife of the
leading Congregational minister, moved from Adelaide to Sydney.
Professor Henry Pearson asked me a year or two later to give similar
information to The Melbourne Age. Subsequently I wrote on this subject,
by request, to Queensland, New Zealand, and I think also Tasmania,
where we were imitated first, but where there are still to be found
children of the State in institutions. In Victoria and New South Wales
a vigorous policy emptied these buildings, which were used for other
public purposes, and the children were dispersed. The innovation which
at first was scouted as utopian, next suspected as leading to neglect,
or even unkindness--for people would only take these children for what
they could make out of them--was found to be so beneficial that nobody
in Australia would like to return to the barrack home or the barrack
school. If the inspection had been from the first merely official,
public opinion would have been suspicious and sceptical, but when
ladies saw the children in these homes, and watched how the dull faces
brightened, and the languid limbs became alert after a few weeks of
ordinary life--when the cheeks became rosier, and the eyes had new
light in them; when they saw that the foster parents took pride in
their progress at school, and made them handy about the house, as they
could never be at an institution, where everything is done at the sound
of a bell or the stroke of a clock--these ladies testified to what they
knew, and the public believed in them. In other English-speaking
countries boarding-out in families is sometimes permitted; but here,
under the Southern Cross, it is the law of the land that children shall
not be brought up in institutions, but in homes: that the child whose
parent is the State shall have as good schooling as the child who has
parents and guardians; that every child shall have, not the discipline
of routine and redtape, but free and cheerful environment of o