[Illustration] At the famous White House Conference on Children, held at the invitation of President Roosevelt, there was practical unanimity on the part of the experts who gathered there that institutional life was undesirable and that wherever possible family life should be maintained. Testimony as to this came from many sources; and keeping the family together, or boarding the orphan with a normal family when adoption could not be arranged, became the dominant note of the conference. The children, in this as in many other instances, led us into searching thought many years ago. Forlorn little Joseph had called upon me with a crumpled note which he reluctantly dragged from a pocket. It was from the admitting agent of an orphanage, explaining that Joseph could not be taken into the institution until his head was “cured”; and it gave some details regarding the family, the worthiness of the mother, and her exceeding poverty. The agent hoped that I might relieve her by expediting Joseph’s admission. I tried to make the child’s daily visit to me interesting. The treatment was not painful, but the end of each visit—he came with patient regularity every day—left me as dolorous as himself. One day I tried, by promise of a present or of any treat he fancied, to bring out some expression of youthful spirit—all unavailingly. “But you must wish for something,” I urged; “I never knew a boy who didn’t.” For the first time the silent little lad showed enthusiasm. “I wish you wouldn’t cure my head, so I needn’t go to the orphan asylum.” Unscrupulous parents, I am well aware, often try to shift the responsibility for their children upon public institutions, but there are many who share Joseph’s aversion to the institutional life, and we early recognized that the dislike is based upon a sound instinct and that a poor home might have compensating advantages compared with the well-equipped institution. There have been great changes in institutional methods since I first had knowledge of them, and much ingenuity has been shown in devising means to encourage the development of individuality and initiative among the orphans. The cottage plan has been introduced in some institutions to modify the abnormal life of large congregations of children. But at best the life is artificial, and the children lose inestimably through not having day by day the experiences of normal existence. Valuable knowledge is lost because the child does not learn from experience the connection between the cost of necessities and the labor necessary to earn them. It was somewhat pathetic, at another conference on child-saving, to hear one of the speakers explain that he tried to meet this need by having the examples in arithmetic relate to the cost of food and household expenditures.