ies. It comprehends the two-fold benefit of _education_
and _labor_ in its system of "Industrial Schools." Of these, at the
present time, in this city, there are eight, in which a multitude of
children are educated, taught to work, supplied with a warm dinner
daily, and with such clothing as they can learn to make. In connection
with these there is one shoe-shop, in which thirty or forty boys earn a
livelihood. Another object of this society is to find employment for its
beneficiaries out of the city, and during the past year places in the
country have been found for one hundred and twenty-five, where their
employers treat them as their own children.

In institutions like these, then, you perceive the indications of a
remedy for the condition of these children of the poor--a system of help
which gives something more than spiritual instruction on the one hand,
something more than mere food and clothing on the other; which combines
measures of relief and nourishment for the demands of our whole nature
in the form of the ignorant and suffering child; and which, better than
all, lifts him out of the humiliating condition of a mere pauper or
dependent, and sets him in a channel of manly exertion,
self-development, and self-support; which not only does the negative
work of removing a mass of evil from society, but makes for it the
positive contribution of an improved and educated humanity. I do not say
that all the relief lies here, that it will do all that is needed, or
that nothing better will be devised. But I think the _tendency_ of these
institutions is the right one, and that they indicate the _way_ in which
this great social problem is to be solved. But it is not necessary to
say that the faith which we cherish in such a system is dead without
works; and that something more is needed than a few model institutions
working here and there. This matter makes a practical claim upon us all,
in the fact that, in one way or another, we may all help forward this
method of relief--we may help it forward as active laborers in the very
midst of the field, as teachers and missionaries, or contributors of our
goods and money. Each knows what he can best do--what is his special,
Providential _call_ in the matter; but let him be assured that he _has_
a call; and that this spectacle of exposed, needy, suffering childhood
is not a mere spectacle for his sympathies, but a field white with a
harvest that waits for his effort. Have we nothi