ed and in his right mind, if his time
to go to work has not yet come. Last year the thirty-three Industrial
Schools of the Children's Aid Society and the American Female Guardian
Society thus dismissed nearly eleven hundred children who, but for their
intervention, might never have reached that goal. That their charity had
not been allowed to corrupt the children may be inferred from the
statement that, with an average daily attendance of 4,348 in the
Children's Aid Society's Schools, 1,729 children were depositors in the
School Savings Banks to the aggregate amount of about $800--a very large
sum for them--and this in the face of the fact, recorded on the school
register, that 938 of the lot came from homes where drunkenness and
poverty went hand in hand. It is not in the plan of the Industrial School
to make paupers, but to develop to the utmost the kernel of self-help that
is the one useful legacy of the street. The child's individuality is
preserved at any cost. Even the clothes that are given to the poorest in
exchange for their rags are of different cut and color, made so with this
one end in view. The distressing "institution look" is wholly absent from
these schools, and one of the great stumbling-blocks of charity
administered at wholesale is thus avoided.

The night schools are for the boys and girls already enlisted in the
treadmill, and who must pick up what learning they can in their off hours.
Together with the day-schools they footed up a total enrolment of nearly
ten thousand children whom this Society reached in 1891. Upon the basis of
the average daily attendance, the cost of their education to the
community, which supported the charity, was $24.53 for each child. The
cost of sheltering, feeding, and teaching 11,770 boys and girls in the
Society's six lodging-houses was $32.76 for each; the expense of sending
2,825 children to farm-homes $9.96 for each. The average cost per year for
each prisoner in the Tombs is $107.75, and for every child maintained in
an Asylum, or in the poor-house, nearly $140.[21]

"One of our great difficulties," says the Secretary of the Children's Aid
Society, in a recent statement of the Society's aims and purposes, echoing
an old grievance, "is with the large boys of the city. There seems to be
no place for them in the world as it is. They have grown up in it without
any training but that in street trades. The trades unions have kept them
from being apprenticed. They are soo