n the number of the homeless
and destitute, if that attempt is to have any chance of success, it
will, I am sure, be necessary to make an alteration in the adage and a
reversal of our present methods.

If the adage ran, "Heaven helps those who cannot help themselves," and
if we all placed ourselves on the side of Heaven, the present abominable
and distressing state of affairs would not endure for a month.

Now I charge it upon the State and local authorities that they avoid
their responsibilities to those who most sorely need their help, and
who, too, have the greatest claim upon their pity and protecting care.
Sometimes those claims are dimly recognised, and half-hearted efforts
are made to care for the unfortunate for a short space of time, and to
protect them for a limited period.

But these attempts only serve to show the futility of the efforts, for
the unfortunates are released from protective care at the very time when
care and protection should become more effectual and permanent.

It is comforting to know that we have in London special schools for
afflicted or defective children. Day by day hundreds of children are
taken to these schools, where genuine efforts are made to instruct them
and to develop their limited powers. But eight hundred children leave
these schools every year; in five years four thousand afflicted children
leave these schools. Leave the schools to live in the underworld of
London, and leave, too, just at the age when protection is urgently
needed. For adolescence brings new passions that need either control or
prohibition.

I want my reader's imagination to dwell for a moment on these four
thousand defectives that leave our special schools every five years;
I want them to ask themselves what becomes of these children, and to
remember that what holds good with London's special schools, holds good
with regard to all other special schools our country over.

These young people grow into manhood and womanhood without the
possibility of growing in wisdom or skill. Few, very few of them,
have the slightest chance of becoming self-reliant or self-supporting;
ultimately they form a not inconsiderable proportion of the hopeless.

Philanthropic societies receive some of them, workhouses receive others,
but these institutions have not, nor do they wish to have, any power of
permanent detention, the cost would be too great. Sooner or later the
greater part of them become a costly burden upon the c