BELGIAN SCHOOL SHIP.

Next, the most potential agency for reform, to wit, the healthful influence of the natural family, is necessarily excluded; and a woman is seldom seen. Some of the poor little motherless and sisterless fellows have hardly any other evidence of her social existence, than the fact that ships are called she, and often bear a woman's effigy as a figure-head.

In hot summer days, indeed, flocks of fair ladies in gay plumage, flit about the quarter-deck and after-cabin; but this is for the entertainment of trustees and officers, and not for any good influence over the boys.*

The justly celebrated Belgian Reform School at Ruysselde, has a NAUTICAL BRANCH. The establishment is in the country, far out of the scent of salt water. They have, however, dug out a small hole which fills up with water of the meadow, and forms a pond, as large as a small duck pond. In the middle of this mimic ocean they have driven piles, and upon them placed the deck of a ship. On each side are the bulwarks; and above rise the masts, with the spars, the shrouds, and the skeleton rigging.

The boys, the future sailors, live on shore, in a building arranged and furnished somewhat like the cabin, and the "between decks" of a ship. Every morning the hammocks are piped, and the boys turn out, and make up their beds. Then they get their breakfast; and, if it doesn't rain or blow a stiff breeze, they march down to the shore of the imaginary ocean, get into a punt, and paddle to the ship; although a smart fellow might almost leap on board, and a long-legged one could wade without wetting his knees. When on board they play sailor; holystone the decks; weigh anchor; hoist the yards; square the yards; belay the ropes; go through all the manoeuvres except throwing the log, which would be impossible, as the craft cannot move. At noon they go on shore to dinner.

Now it is a less bitter mockery to call this establishment a ship, and this life sailor's life, than it is to call a crowd of boys in our School Ships a family; and to call the mimic influences brought to bear upon them, social and domestic influences, which they, above all others, need.

* A recent improvement has been made by employing female teachers some hours a day.

FIFTH ANNUAL REPORT, 1868.

When all disabilities of law, and of fashion, are removed, and women can co-operate with men in the organization of public institutions, whether penal, correctional, reformatory or charitable; and when they can compete with men for the administration of such institutions, then the natural forces and affinities will have free play, and their quicker instincts and warmer sympathies will secure to them the greatest influence. Then will there be less reliance upon granite and iron, upon force and fear, and more reliance upon moral agencies. Then will the institution of the family be used as the chief agency for correctional and reformatory processes; and public charity and beneficence be administered, not solely in a few great houses set upon hills, to be seen of men, but will be multiplied an hundred fold, and carried on in the humble dwellings of the poor.

Then will Protestantism, for the first time, outdo in beauty the fairest fruits of Catholicism; and our sisters of charity and sisters of mercy, will pervade the land, and bless it with practical Christianity, though they be undistinguished by starched muslin, or by the neglect of any social or domestic duties.

Such is the work to be done; and such are the means for doing it. By cautious and gradual legislation based upon sound sociological principles; by a system of decentralization; by enlisting the largest possible number of families and private citizens in the work of reforming and training the dependent classes; by encouraging the organization of benevolent societies, and by promoting in every possible way the growth of individual charity, we may hope to stop the extension of public legalized charity, and then to diminish its operations by throwing the work where it belongs, into the hands of the people.

The unwise and dangerous policy of aggregating the defectives, the vicious, and the helpless, in central depots, will be followed no further than immediate necessity demands; and the opposite policy of decentralization and diffusion will be substituted, and extended as far as is possible.

The multiplication of public special institutions will be stopped; and the growth of existing ones will be checked before they attain to monstrous proportions. But, above all,

RECENT LEGISLATION.

the myriad rills of private charity which are rather checked than increased by enforced public charity, will pour forth continuous supplies. Small charitable associations will spring up over the land; private families will become agencies for aiding, training, reforming and comforting the dependent classes; dwelling-houses will become asylums; and the by-ways of life will be trod by women bent on errands of charity, and works of beneficence.

This is not an ideal picture. Its main features may be seen in some small communities where legalized and enforced public charity hardly exists. Massachusetts has many communities, in which may yet be realized in all their beauty, plans which are now smiled at as the dreams of philanthropists.

The Board now comes to a consideration of such of the matters reported upon to it by the Secretary, and by the General Agent, as require special notice, though not in the exact order of their presentation.

Most of the subjects mentioned in the first chapter of the Secretary's Report, under the head RECENT LEGISLATION AND ITS EFFECTS, require no other notice farther than the general remark that the beneficial result of that legislation is so plain that he who runs may read.

The New Law of Settlement

Has already checked the rapid numerical growth of persons without legal settlement, who were candidates for the State pauper establishment; and has helped to do away with an unjust and invidious distinction among our people. Any man, whereever born, "who has borne his share of public burdens, ought not to be deprived of the rights that accompany them." Aliens, who have fulfilled all the conditions of settlement, ought to share its privileges with the native born. The new legislation is based upon these principles.

The State Aid Law

Is very liable to be defeated in its patriotic and generous purpose by the extreme difficulty of its enforcement; by the

FIFTH ANNUAL REPORT, 1868.

inherent tendency of all such legislation to lessen self-respect in individuals, to habituate them to receiving support, and to encourage habits of idleness.

Sanitary Legislation.

All the Acts included under this head are doing manifest good. They are, however, only steps in the right direction. If followed up and carried out by municipal action and by voluntary association of benevolent persons, they will go far to prevent the dreadful culmination of evil which is seen in the crowded cities of Europe. The Board has considered the general subject pretty fully in a previous part of this Report. The next subject is that of the care of

Foundling and Deserted Children.

The Secretary earnestly asks the attention of the Board, and of the Legislature to his statements, and his recommendations touching this important and interesting matter. It should be said, in justice to him, that he has laboriously investigated it; that he has eloquently set forth, in season and out of season, officially and unofficially, the importance of doing something to lessen the suffering and the death-rate of these children of the public; and that he has personally led off in the measures which have resulted in the establishment of the Massachusetts Infant Asylum.

The history of Foundling Hospitals-their origin in the earliest times, their wide popularity, rapid extension, abuses, disfavor, and decline, furnish an instructive lesson for the student of sociology.

As the Legislature has been pressed to establish a Hospital here, and will probably be further pressed, the Board may properly make some remarks and suggestions upon the matter.

In the earliest periods of civilization as people congregate in numbers at central points, and partially renounce that individual self-guidance by the animal instincts which direct savage life, then the affections of the mother seem to be no longer a sufficient safeguard for the life of infants. Even now they are readily abandoned in all semi-civilized countries.

FOUNDLINGS AND DESERTED CHILDREN.

When the poor become slaves of the rich; and the wives of the poor slaves of their husbands, it is less desirable to raise up children to share the degradation. The loss of the freedom of savage and nomadic life seems to have lessened individuality, and of course diminished paternal and even maternal affections; for these are, in some sense, transferred affections,-the selfregard of the parents transferred to the child as part of themselves. Those, therefore, who have but little self-respect, have but little regard for their offspring, at least after the period of purely animal instinct is passed.

As outward possessions became the measure of respectability, and the competition for livelihood became sharper in the centres of population, children often became rather a burden than a blessing. At any rate, they were, in the early ages, usually abandoned if feeble or deformed; and frequently abandoned if they were merely burdensome. The destruction of defective or deformed children was not only encouraged, but directed by governments. A special law of Rome directed the father to destroy his deformed child; while the Spartan law left him no discretion, but commanded it to be thrown in the cavern, on Taygetus. But infanticide, however countenanced, could never have been very extensive. The instinctive repugnance to shedding blood forbids that. Whenever the people have any choice, the abandonment of infants takes the place of infanticide.

This abandonment prevailed extensively in the earliest times in large cities, especially among the poor. It was, however, seldom absolute. The yearning of the mother prompted the hope that the gods, or some humane man might preserve a life which she could not. Moses was placed on the river's brink; Oedipus left on Mt. Cithaeron; and Romulus to the nursing wolf.

Infants were generally exposed in places designated for the purpose. In Greek cities certain of the Gymnasia; in Rome one of the market places. Thither people went to look for foundlings, as men repair to certain spots on the shore for choice bits of amber thrown up by the sea.

The fine children were selected for their beauty or strength, to be raised as slaves; and the strangely distorted ones for their deformity, that gain might be had from showing them as mon