individual guardian to secure good foster-parents. The legal duties of the official guardian, such as the provision of maintenance for the child, are merely routine official duties. It is much easier to secure the requisite ten confidential assistants than to secure a hundred private guardians. _The Tendency of Evolution._--(_a_) The property of a ward is usually inherited, and as time goes on such property becomes of less and less importance. The guardianship we are considering here has very little to do with such questions of property, and the guardian’s activities are practically limited to securing the personal well-being of the child. (_b_) Official guardianship is a typical example, on the one hand, of the manner in which a matter appertaining to civil law tends to become an affair of local administrative activity, and in which duties originally honorary and benevolent tend to pass into the hands of a salaried public official; and, on the other hand, of the fact that in this sphere also the principle of the division of labour comes to be ever more strictly applied, so that functions formerly exercised non-professionally by private individuals are now discharged professionally by public servants. The importance of official guardianship has steadily increased. The idea that the guardianship of children supported by the community might be exercised by the poor-law authorities was first put into practice in France towards the end of the eighteenth century. In other countries the same idea has been applied with greater or less modification. In Germany, official and institutional guardianship were permitted by the Civil Code of 1900. Official guardianship exists at present only in the larger towns; but the institution continues to spread. In France, a law enacted in the year 1889 permits the voluntary transference of parental authority to the _Assistance Publique_, in which case the Prefect or his representative, the Departmental Inspector _des enfants assistés_, acts as guardian. By the law passed in the year 1904, the same inspector acts as guardian of the _enfants assistés_. But the inspector has no concern with the enforcement of the rights of illegitimate children as against their father, since any inquiry into paternity is forbidden by the French Civil Code. Official guardianship exists in many of the cantons of Switzerland.