CHAPTER XX.

PROVIDING COUNTRY HOMES.

THE OPPOSITION TO THIS REMEDY--ITS EFFECTS.

This most sound and practical of charities always met with an intense
opposition here from a certain class, for bigoted reasons. The poor were
early taught, even from the altar, that the whole scheme of emigration
was one of "proselytizing" and that every child thus taken forth was
made, a "Protestant." Stories were spread, too, that these unfortunate
children were re-named in the West, and that thus even brothers and
sisters might meet and perhaps marry! Others scattered the pleasant
information that the little ones "were sold as slaves," and that the
agents enriched themselves from the transaction.

These were the obstacles and objections among the poor themselves. So
powerful were these, that it would often happen that a poor woman,
seeing her child becoming ruined on the streets, and soon plainly to
come forth as a criminal, would prefer this to a good home in the West;
and we would have the discouragement of beholding the lad a thief behind
prison-bars, when a journey to the country would have saved him. Most
distressing of all was, when a drunken mother or father followed a
half-starved boy, already scarred and sore with their brutality, and
snatched him from one of our parties of little emigrants, all joyful
with their new prospects, only to beat him and leave him on the
streets.

With a small number of the better classes there was also a determined
opposition to this humane remedy. What may be called the
"Asylum-interest" set itself in stiff repugnance to our
emigration-scheme. They claimed--and I presume the most obstinate among
them still claim--that we were scattering poison over the country, and
that we benefited neither the farmers nor the children. They urged that
a restraint of a few years in an Asylum or House of Detention rendered
these children of poverty much more fit for practical life, and purified
them to be good members of society.

We, on the other hand, took the ground that, as our children were not
criminals, but simply destitute and homeless boys and girls, usually
with some ostensible occupation, they could not easily, on any legal
grounds, be inclosed within Asylums; that, if they were, the expense of
their maintenance would be enormous, while the cost of a temporary care
of them in our Schools and Lodging-houses, and their transferrence to
the We