Mr. Jackson's view ranges over some three thousand children of both sexes rescued from the very lowest haunts of misery and vice, picked up forlorn and deserted from the gutters of Birmingham, snatched from the evil influence of parents who had carried active cruelty or passive neglect to such terrible lengths that the retributive hand of human law had at last fallen upon them, from parents who would have deliberately forced their offspring to mendicancy, to thievery, or to prostitution. These three thousand worse than destitute little ones, these infants "crying in the night, and with no language but a cry." who had started their sad lives on the very threshold of that dark door over which is written, "All hope abandon," were rescued by kindly hands and carried into the sunshine. For a time they were fed, and clothed, and schooled, taught that there was something more in life than squalor and selfishness and vice, and then they were taken thousands of miles away from those foul slums in which their eyes had first opened to the murky light, their tender sensibilities first awakened to the bitter lesson of human pain and misery. They were taken to where God's fresh, free air sweeps across leagues of virgin forest and prairie, to where existence is vigorous, it may be, but healthy, and pure, and invigorating, to where conditions are such as to develop strong, self-reliant manhood, instead of debased and neurotic criminality. It was in the complete and sweeping character of the change that lay the wisdom of the scheme. On the lone backwood farmstead of Canada the slum child had no opportunity, even had he wished, of once more coming within the range of vicious influences such as he had left. There was no temptation to many of the vices with which cruel circumstances had made him so terribly familiar. Heredity of evil was cheated of its chances, and whatever tendencies to good remained were fostered and given full scope for development. Further, the degraded relatives were no longer able to act the part of a millstone around the child's neck, to fetter his every aspiration to a better life, to drag him down or keep him down to their own dark state.... Hundreds upon hundreds of prosperous farmers in Canada at this day can look back to the dim past, when they sold matches or papers, or picked up as best they could, in the streets of Birmingham, a few stray coppers to take home to their dissolute parents; to the time when, with empty stomachs and with the rain and snow beating through ragged garments onto their little pinched bodies, they cried through the rigours of winter nights on a sheltered doorstep rather than face the blows and curses which awaited them in the only place which they could call home. They were born to poverty and crime "as the sparks fly upward," and they have lived to thank God for that kindly agency which rescued them from their inheritance of misery.