private contributors." Now, it runs not only the New York house but its Western agency as well on its income. The city pays the bills, but exercises no other control over the institutions. It does not even trouble itself with counting the children.[31] The committing magistrate consults and is guided more or less by the Officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, in his choice of the institution into which the child is put. But both are bound by the law that imposes the "faith-test." The faith-test, as enforced by civil law anywhere, is absurd. The parents of the eighty per cent. of children in institutions who were not orphans, split no theological hairs in ridding themselves of their support. Backed by the money sacks of a great and wealthy city, it is injurious humbug. This is not the perfection of organized charitable effort for the rescue of the children of which I spoke, but rather the perversion of it. It is reasonable to ask that if the public is to pay the piper, the public should have the hiring of him too. A special city officer is needed to have this matter in charge. Nearly six years ago Commissioner Lowell submitted a draft for a bill creating a department for the care of dependent children in New York City, with a commissioner at the head whose powers would have been an effective check upon the evil tendencies of the present law. But we travel slowly along the path of municipal reform, and the commissioner is yet a dream. Some day we may wake up and find him there, and then we shall be ready, by and by, to carry out the ideal plan of placing those children, for whom free homes cannot be found, out at board in families where they shall come by their rights, denied them by institution life. Then, too, we shall find, I think, that there is a good deal less of the problem than we thought. The managers of the Union Temporary Home in Philadelphia decided, after thirty one years of work, to close the House and put the children out to board, because experience had convinced them that "life in the average institution is not so good for children as life in the average home." The intelligence of the conclusion, and the earnestness with which they presented it, guaranteed that their "Home" had been above the average.