This special work (of taking dependent children from poorhouses and other public institutions and placing them in private families, thus returning to a natural and happy life those who, but for such transplanting, would have been doomed to grow up tainted with pauperism and vice) owes its inception to the personal devotion and the labor of years of individual women in certain counties of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. But for the proof of its wisdom and practicability which they gave by their successful work, it would never have assumed the position it now holds. These women have not only saved the individual children whom they took from vile surroundings, amid the contaminating companionship of the lowest of men and women, but they have set an example which is spreading over the country and which will change for the better the future of whole States. The Women’s Prison Association of New York visits the prisons of New York and Brooklyn, and within a few years the Women’s Christian Temperance Union has organized a department of prison work, which will be spoken of elsewhere in this book,[191] but until their attention was thus called to the horrible evils of the county jails of this country, its women, with the rarest exceptions, seemed absolutely ignorant of this great national wickedness. In Massachusetts women are, and have been for a few years, members of the Prison Board, and in Massachusetts, Indiana, and New York, there are State prisons and reformatories for women under the charge of women officers. Women are peculiarly fitted for the work of inspecting public institutions, and it would be much better if, in every community, instead of starting so many private institutions of charity, they would give their attention to the oversight of the public institutions, already necessarily existing, and which, too often, by their mismanagement, very much increase, not only the sufferings of the miserable people already in them, but also the number of those who will hereafter have to be supported as inmates. II. Another class of sufferers needing tender care are the inmates of private Homes for old people, convalescents, and incurables; and of hospitals, reformatories, and asylums for children. Such institutions as these are usually established and managed by women, excepting the hospitals, which, though under the care of men, often have an associate board of women to take the oversight of the daily comfort of the patients. The Homes for the aged in our cities are many of them established by churches for their dependent members, and in almost all an entrance fee is required. There are Homes for aged married couples in some of our cities, and in many, also, a free Home for old men and women, maintained by the Roman Catholic Little Sisters of the Poor, who receive inmates, however, of every faith.