in the common schools it is right and proper that religious instruction should not be imparted, because such instruction can be given by parents at home, the case is quite different where the children are removed from parental influence, good or bad, and are constant inmates of an institution. Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant alike would agree in believing that for such children, particularly when they were wayward or criminal, the advantages of religious training of some sort are incalculable; and this is recognized to-day in the statutes of the State, it being the explanation of the provision of the law which requires children to be placed "in such an asylum or other institution as shall then be controlled by persons of the same religious faith as the parents of such child" (chapter 438 of 1884, section 2), and similar provisions in other laws. In the discussion, therefore, of State institutions as against institutions under private control this phase of the subject should never be overlooked.

Another matter needing very careful study is the line of demarcation to be drawn between dependent and delinquent children. In the eye of the law those children only are to be regarded as delinquent who have been found guilty of an infraction of law, that is to say, a charge of some sort must be made against a child; that charge must have been passed upon by a court and sustained, before the child is to be legally classed as a delinquent; but as regards method of treatment a child not accused of any crime at all, but committed to an institution as a dependent or for no proper guardianship, may be for all practical purposes quite as much a delinquent child as one legally branded as such, and therefore become a demoralizing influence upon other children and itself a proper subject for reformatory work. Nay, more, the really difficult subject for reformatory treatment is not the child who has been guilty of a single offense, venial or heinous, but the child who by reason of neglect and lack of any proper training has reverted to the nomadic type; has thrown off all regard for law, all respect for authority, all desire for work of any sort, physical or mental, and is not only content to live the precarious life of the street, but prefers that life. Now, as the law stands to-day there is no certain and proper way of classifying children in an institution. There are certain institutions, of course, which

receive only what are called " dependent" children. There are other institutions which receive not only children who are charged with offenses, but children who are committed, under the Penal Code, for associating with improper persons, under the technical charge of "no proper guardianship." These children may or may not be delinquent children, but the tendency of the official is to treat them as dependent children, and there are still other institutions which receive technical dependents and technical delinquents, and as to this latter class of institution, it is quite customary to-day to criticize the managers of the institution and the judges for permitting a contaminating influence to be exercised upon good children (dependents) by bad children (delinquents). As a matter of fact, the line between good and bad, between contaminating and contaminated, does not run at all on the legal distinction between dependent and delinquent. A boy who is convicted of the violation of a city ordinance by playing ball in the street and breaking windows is a legal delinquent who, though technically guilty of the charge, may be in no proper sense a delinquent, while the child who was committed solely on the ground of no proper guardianship, but who has been accustomed to associate with drunken and immoral persons, whose mind has become thoroughly polluted, whose vocabulary is largely composed of the thieves' argot, and who is already past master in the lower grades of vice and crime, is not legally a delinquent at all, but is actually a fountain head of immorality and evil for all his companions. What then is needed in the administration of institutions for children is a new classification based upon observed character, not on any preliminary charge; and the reformatory training needed is training which should be proportionate, in duration and in character of instruction, to the character of the child, not at all to any supposed penalty based on the commission of a misdemeanor or a crime. Reformatory work, if it is to justify its name at all, has no punitive element in it. It addresses itself to aiding in the reformation of its subject and not to punishing him as an offender. If more time than the ordinary sentence is required to accomplish reformation in a given case, that time ought to be allowed. If the age and character of the child is such as to make trade teaching beneficial, time

should be given for trade teaching. Above all the school itself should be a school, not a prison. The boy or girl who is sent to such an institution should be taught in every possible way to regard the institution as a home, not as a jail, and its officers as his friends, not his jailers. Even the adoption of the indeterminate sentence does not solve the question, for, as pointed out, the child who needs reformatory care may not be a delinquent, i. e., an offender, at all. What is needed is a preliminary place of detention for the determination of the needs of the child, who should become the subject of careful observation. This house of detention should be a moral quarantine, and the children who are fit to pass directly from it either to their own homes or to new homes should be speedily passed on. The children who are not fit for homes should be made subjects of reformatory care in suitable institutions, in which there should be an attempt to classify on the lines of moral progress.

There is no reason why promotion should not be made on moral lines, as well as on mental ones. If a boy can be promoted from one school grade to another as he advances in study, there would seem to be no good reason why the same boy should not be promoted into a better environment of companionship as he advances in character and deportment, and hence arises the demand for the cottage-home school.

Respectfully submitted.

MORNAY WILLIAMS,

Chairman.

MRS. HENRY ALTMAN,

MRS. LEWIS BIGELOW,

MRS. JOHN DAVENPORT,

R. R. REEDER,

HENRY SOLOMON,

R. C. BAKER,

PAUL T. BRADY,

J. H. CONROY,

CHARLES H. JOHNSON,

CYRUS C. LATHROP,

WILLIAM O. STILLMAN,

LAFAYETTE L. LONG.

CHAIRMAN WILLIAMS: I regret that of necessity the report had to be made so long; but the subjects that had to be touched on could not well be covered in less space.

I have now, however, great pleasure in presenting the more interesting parts of the evening program. Following the report of the committee, the first paper to be presented is "The School as a Training Place for the Home," and I take pleasure in presenting to this audience, and to the Conference of Charities, Mr. Charles D. Hilles, formerly of Ohio, but now Superintendent of the New York Juvenile Asylum, who will read a paper on the subject announced.

THE SCHOOL AS A TRAINING PLACE FOR THE HOME.

As society is organized to-day, there are thousands of children who have become public dependents by reason of the death, de sertion, intemperance, indifference or incapacity of parents. In many cases the church or governmental or charitable agencies speedily shift the responsibility to individuals, the technical term for which is direct placing-out; in other cases the process is more tedious, requiring the intervention of the institutions designed to prepare unfortunate children for normal home life.

It is not difficult to dispose of the robust, wholesome specimens, especially those of gentle breeding, and there are other less favored classes that do not meet with serious resistance, but there is a residuum of large proportions that requires patient study, medical treatment and careful cultivation. This last class comprises the children of warring and divorced parents, the truants, the incorrigible, the youthful congenital criminals, and those who, as the result of abuse and neglect, suffer with curvature of the spine, chronic eye and scalp diseases and needlessly impoverished constitutions.

It is true to-day, as it has always been, that the normal, attractive child who is stripped of all impediments, will everywhere find the latch-string out, and in the preliminary sifting process will be saved for those who deserve a selected child.

The time was, when students in this field saw two camps; one composed of the stout partisans of the institution, and the other of ardent advocates of direct placing-out of all children. There

were indications of a collision between the camps, but at the Cincinnati meeting of the National Conference in 1899 it was seen that a schism would be senseless, and manifest that there was not only work enough for all useful child-caring instrumentalities, but more to be done than the forces at hand, which have a common vital purpose, could wisely perform. Speaking for the placingout societies in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont, Mr. Hall said that good desirable homes could not be found for all destitute and neglected children, and that if it were possible to find them, it would be unwise to place those who are only temporarily destitute. Many children of disorderly and immoral parents, it was said, are morally and physically destitute, and unfit to be placed in families, without preliminary training and instruction. The same authority asserted that he had been engaged in the work for many years in the three New England States, and wherever children were placed, directly or recently from their own homes, they were almost invariably returned as unsuitable and undesirable, whereas fully ninety per cent of the boys and girls who had been trained in institutions for a year or more, were placed in the same families and gave general satisfaction. Mr. Hall further announced that the best he could do for a child who had been tested and found eligible was to place it in a Christian family of modest means, preferably in a home from which a son or daughter had gone-and thus be assured of the affectionate interest of persons experienced in training children. Such a home, with kindly and parental relations, he declared with emphasis, is the only home that can be claimed to be better for children than an institution organized on the cottage or family plan.

Two of the very largest American placing-out agencies, one in New York and the other in Chicago, are reluctant witnesses to the fact that a testing process is essential, for both have recently established homes for the detention of the little volunteers. One of these societies has enlarged and multiplied its receiving stations until now it has four buildings, with an aggregate capacity of more than one hundred. These societies report a growing tendency, in the states they serve, toward legislative restrictions and hostility. They find, too, a demand for reliable data, in