One great evil of institutions for children is quite overlooked—the effect on the parents of relieving them of the care of their children,—because the attention of the managers is almost exclusively devoted to the care of the children while in the institution; they do not think it part of their duty to study the family from which the child was taken, or the influences which surrounded it before it came under their charge; nor do they, with rare exceptions, follow the children’s lives with any systematic care after they leave them. They thus know nothing of the results of their own work, and may be doing great evil, where they wish only to do good. In Dorchester, Mass., there is a small “Industrial School for Girls,” which seems to be especially distinguished from most other Homes of the kind, by the thorough and systematic manner in which the children who have left the school are watched over. Besides the standing committee on “placing out,” which is required to report to the managers once in three months concerning the girls under its charge (those who, having been fitted in the school for household work, have been put into places to earn their living), a “Committee on Friendly Guardianship” has been created, whose duties are thus described in the report of the school for the year 1887: “To keep a list of all girls leaving the school, who, through the expiration of the papers placing them under our care, are no longer formally wards of the school; to keep up a knowledge of these girls and to report concerning their welfare twice a year, such report to be added to the secretary’s records. The term Friendly Guardianship is used to distinguish this oversight, which does not carry with it any formal authority, from the usual school guardianship of girls who are placed under our care for a period beyond that passed at school, and which is recognized as authoritative by the girls themselves and by their relatives, if they have any.” In the report for 1888, it is stated that there are thirty-four girls under direct school guardianship, thirty-five under the charge of the Friendly Guardianship Committee, and an account is given of the present condition of fifty-eight earlier school graduates. The following reflection, found in the report, applies equally to other institutions of the same character: “The expense of caring for a child at the Industrial School is large as compared with the cost of boarding in a private family, and this expense can only be justified by keeping up a high standard in the school, and by adding a large amount of personal work outside and beyond the school for the girls who have gone out from it.”