hich
children are put, and in selecting employers. The whole Association is
well organized. The annual cost of the children, dividing the whole
expense by the number of children placed and cared for, is only from
fifty dollars to fifty-five dollars per head. The Roman Catholic
Association, St. Brigid's, is even more economical in its work, as the
labor is mainly performed by the members of the sisterhoods. Within
seven years five hundred children were taken in charge, of whom two
hundred had been adopted or placed out. The children thus provided for
in country families are constantly visited by the conductors of the
orphanage and by the parish priest. The expense of the whole enterprise
is very slight.

Similar experiments are being made in England with pauper children, and,
despite Prof. Fawcett's somewhat impractical objections, they have been
found to be successful and far more economical than the old system.

THE FAMILY PLAN.

The Massachusetts Board of State Charities, one of the ablest Boards
that have ever treated these questions, well observes in its report for
1868: "The tendency in all civilized countries is toward the family
system, through (1st) the Foundling Hospital and (2d) the Asylum or Home
System; and the mortality among infants of this class is reduced from
ninety or ninety-five per cent, under the old no-system, from forty to
sixty per cent. in well-managed Foundling Hospitals, from thirty to
fifty per cent. in good Asylums, and from twenty to thirty-five per
cent. in good single families, the last being scarcely above the normal
death-rate of all infants."

The "placing-out" system, is of coarse, liable to shocking abuse, as the
experience of private offices for the care of foundlings in Paris, and
recently in London, painfully shows. It mast be carried on with the
utmost publicity, and under careful responsibility. But under a
respectable and faithful board of trustees, with careful organization
and inspection, there is no reason why the one thousand illegitimate
children born every year in New York city should not be placed in good
country families, under the best of care and with the prospect of
saving, at least, seven hundred out of the thousand, instead of losing
that proportion; and all this under an expense of about one-tenth that
of an Asylum. Why will our benevolent ladies and gentlemen keep up the
old monastic ideas of the necessity of herding these unfortuna