There was no sort of hesitation on the part of anyone to claim of the “Mother” the help and protection to which, as her veritable children, they were justly entitled. Pauperism and workhouses did not exist, simply because the State saw the wisdom of preventing squalor and destitution by its system of claiming the care of its people from their infancy, and being generous in its mode of launching them in life. When we reflect upon the enormous sums which are collected for poor rates in England, it is easy to conceive the vast social improvement the same amount of money and labour could produce, if spent in the education and fair start in life of our thousands of miserable and squalid gutter-birds, who, instead of being all their life-long a continual source of expense to the nation, would grow up respectable and respected units of society, abhorring the life of shame and degradation which they and only too many others look upon at present as their natural birthright. “Prevention is better than cure,” is just as trite and useful a maxim for the State as it is for the subject, as is also the warning against being “penny-wise and pound-foolish.” It would cost much less for our country to feed, clothe, educate, and train to useful avocations half-a-million youngsters taken from the slums, than it would cost to meet one-half of the expenses that same half-million of juveniles will provide for their compatriots before they have run the course of drunkenness, pauperism, misery, and crime which the laws of cause and effect have only too surely marked out for them in the unhappy future. When comparing New Amazonia with England, another idea suggests itself. How much of the national prosperity I saw around me was owing to the fact that New Amazonia was free from the incubus of having to provide vast sums for the support of a monarchy which with us is exceedingly limited in its beneficent effects, but which possesses an unlimited capacity for appropriating huge emoluments which would be more sensibly spent in liquidating the National Debt, or in alleviating some of the national misery! If saddled with the incalculable burdens which England has to bear, even New Amazonian rulers would find it a difficult task to present a satisfactory budget at the end of their term of office.