Then she returned at once to her work in asylums, poorhouses, and prisons, continuing this task until past her seventy-fifth year. "Her frequent visits to our institutions of the insane now, and her searching criticisms," wrote a leading alienist, "constitute of themselves a better lunacy commission than would be likely to be appointed in many of our states."[17] The last five years of her life were spent as a guest in the New Jersey State Asylum at Trenton, it being fit that one of the thirty-two hospitals she had been the means of erecting should afford her a home for her declining years. Miss Dix was called by many "our Lady," "our Patron Saint"; and well she deserved these expressions of reverence. President Fillmore said in a letter to her, "Wealth and power never reared such monuments to selfish pride as you have reared to the love of mankind." She had the unreserved consecration to the needs of the poor and suffering that caused her to write: "If I am cold, they are cold; if I am weary, they are distressed; if I am alone, they are abandoned."[18] Her biographer justly compares her with the greatest of the saints, and says, "Precisely the same characteristics marked her, the same absolute religious consecration, the same heroic readiness to trample under foot the pains of illness, loneliness, and opposition, the same intellectual grasp of what a great reformatory work demanded."[19] Truly was it said of her that she was "the most useful and distinguished woman America has produced."[20] [Sidenote: Child-saving Missions.] As was justly said by Professor Francis G. Peabody, "the Boston Children's Mission was the direct fruit of the ministry of Dr. Tuckerman, and antedates all other conspicuous undertakings of the same nature. The first president of the Children's Mission, John E. Williams, a Unitarian layman, moved later to New York, and became the first treasurer of the newly created Children's Aid Society of that city, formed in 1853. Thus the work of the Children's Mission and the kindred service of the Warren Street Chapel, under the leadership of Charles Barnard, must be reckoned as the most immediate, if not the only American antecedent, of the great modern works of child-saving charity."[21]