We are continually forced, also, towards the newer and more distant States, where labor is more in demand, and the temper of the population is more generous, so that the average expense of the aid thus given will in the future be greater for each boy or girl relieved.
The opposition, too, of the bigoted poor increases, undoubtedly under the influence of some of the more prejudiced priests, who suppose that the poor are thus removed from ecclesiastical influences. A class of children, whom we used thus to benefit, are now sent to the Catholic Protectory, or are retained in the City Alms-house on Randall's Island.
Were our movement allowed its full scope, we could take the place of every Orphan Asylum and Alms-house for pauper children in and around New York, and thus save the public hundreds of thousands of dollars, and immensely benefit the children. We could easily "locate" 5,000 children per annum, from the ages of two years to fifteen, in good homes in the West, at an average net cost of fifteen dollars per head.
If Professor Fawcett's objection [See Fawcett on "Pauperism.">[ be urged, that we are thus doing for the children of the Alms-house poor, what the industrious and self-supporting poor cannot get done for their own children, we answer that we are perfectly ready to do the same for the outside hard-working poor; but their attachment to the city, their ignorance or bigotry, and their affection for their children, will always prevent them from making use of such a benefaction to any large degree. The poor, living in their own homes, seldom wish to send out their children in this way. We do "place out" a certain number of such children; but the great majority of our little emigrants are the "waifs and strays" of the streets in a large city.
OUR AGENTS.
The Charity I am describing has been singularly fortunate in its agents; but in none more so than in those who performed its responsible work in the West.
Mr. E. P. Smith, who writes the interesting description above, of the first expedition we sent to the West, has since become honorably distinguished by labors among the freedmen as agent of the Christian Commission.
Our most successful agent, however, was Mr. C. C. Tracy, who had a certain quaintness of conversation and anecdote, and a solid kindness and benevolence, which won his way with the Western farmers, as well as the little flocks he conducted to their new fold.
One of his favorite apothegms became almost a proverb.
"Won't the boy ran away?" was the frequent anxious inquiry from the farmers.