From these considerations it would appear that only in special circumstances is institutional care necessary or desirable. In the case, for instance, of children physically or mentally ill, we cannot dispense with institutional care. Moreover, institutions are necessary as a supplement to the system of family care--institutions having the characteristics of a depot and an asylum. Such depots are indispensable, if only for the reason that orphans immediately after the loss of their parents are in a condition of mingled depression and excitement, and must, therefore, before being boarded with a family, be calmed and strengthened for a time by a sojourn in an institution. As a result of all these considerations, the tendency of evolution is to replace institutional care by a form of family care in which the foster-parents are supervised from a central depot, which serves also for the temporary institutional care of children needing such care. Whereas formerly institutional upbringing was the dominant method, to-day family upbringing has become of much greater importance. _Supervision of Family Care._--The modern State no longer regards the family care of children by others than their own parents as a purely private matter. A few decades ago, to receive children in this way for pay was an open profession, but it is so no longer. The local authorities regulate the matter in detail, defining very precisely the standard of life of the boarded-out child and the methods of supervision; and, as a result of this intervention, the scandalous mortality attendant upon the old-time baby-farming is now largely a thing of the past. Where children are received in family care for pay, the intention is that these children should have all the advantages of the natural care they would have obtained in their own families. Thus, as far as possible, the child should remain permanently with the same family. In actual fact, a proportion of the children committed to family care do permanently remain with their foster-parents--a proportion are indeed adopted. Since the children are as a rule the offspring of poor parents, and inasmuch as well-to-do people rarely trouble themselves to undertake the upbringing of other people’s children, the foster-parents will themselves usually be poor. But they must not be extremely poor, for if this were so, even though the remuneration were ample, the greater part of the money would be used by them for their own purposes, to the consequent detriment of the child. But the foster-parents usually want to make some profit. In many countries they have to demonstrate that there is no absolute financial necessity for them to receive a boarded-out child. It is as well, in any case, that the social position of the foster-parents should be at least a trifle higher than that of the real parents of the child. Persons in receipt of public assistance are not suitable as foster-parents.