The first of these is as to the right of the institu tion to exist at all. A fairly good case can be made out against it. It is better that children should be kept alive in an institution than left to die of ex posure and starvation, but the alternative to the institution is frequently not starvation, but care by the mother, or care in a well-selected and care fully supervised boarding home. What if all the hundred thousand children now in orphan asylums —only one child in every three hundred of the population under sixteen—could be kept with their own mothers, or with relatives, or with foster parents, or even with paid care-takers in a boarding home, at very little more expense than it costs to build and maintain the institutions? These re flections haunt the memory and make uncomfort able the conscience of all who have ever really seen institutional children.
In some places institutions seem to be necessary. In New York it is not easy to see how we could entirely displace them. Our conditions are ab normal and all but impossible. Immigration, con gestion, religious interests, a great investment in institutional plants, and an existing subsidy system conspire to put what are thought to be insuperable obstacles in the way of any radical substitution of placing and boarding out for institutions, and even make difficult any general substitution of the cot tage for the congregate system. It seems quixotic to be advocating any change there. Reforms and improvements in the existing system are possible and will surely be made, but there is little prospect of retracing the steps by which that system has been established and intrenched. But seeing it thus in full operation, and recognizing that its permanence there seems probable, I bear my testi mony in any community not so situated, that it is wasteful of child life, wasteful of educational op portunities, wasteful of economic efficiency and character, promotive often of a spirit the opposite of law-abiding, and this because it does not give an experience to the child in natural family and neigh borhood relationships, does not teach the value and use of money in exchange, does not give an opportunity for the development of self-reliance and self-direction, does not gradually initiate the child into the every-day routine of free citizenship, but necessarily represses his budding individuality, limits and controls the exercise of his judgment as of his body, contracts his vision, mutilates his facul ties, distorts his sense of values.
I have recently had occasion to make an inspec tion of an institution—not a large one, such as you think of as typical of New York, but neverthe less distinctly an institutional institution. It was sanitary, light, airy, and well built. There were schoolrooms, play-rooms and gymnasium, excellent kitchen, laundry, bakery, and dormitories. There were humane managers and a visiting physician. They had twenty acres of land for gardens and playground, and the kindly personal interest of the members of a large association to which the home bears somewhat informal official relation.
And yet, under all these favorable conditions, the children were not receiving the physical or the educational or the religious care which is childhood's birthright. Even yet the wasted opportunities in the lives of that hundred children appall and oppress me. Even yet the dull unresponsiveness of that group of children weighs upon me,—though we did not leave them until we had broken through it and made them laugh and their eyes dance over the prospect of a match ball game and other ideas which they could take in and respond to. The four hours of that day spent in their company on serious business have lifted for me a little way a curtain behind which there lurk too much dark ness, too much community neglect, too much in difference, too much ostrich-like concealment of an age-long, age-unsolved problem.
Next after the question as to the legitimacy of the institution itself is that of the financial system upon which it is conducted.
Privately endowed orphan asylums would be the most dangerous of all perpetually endowed institu tions. An institution which is conducted by the state or the city and supported by taxpayers, being obliged to justify itself from year to year and sub ject to inspection by a competent state board of charities, is far less apt to fall behind the educa tional ideals and standards of the community. A small church home, caring for the children in a particular neighborhood, visited by church mem bers and supported by their contributions,—al though likely to be inadequately equipped,—may be free from serious abuses. A modest receiving home, in which children are kept for a brief time for observation and study, prior to placement in a foster home, is apt to remain wholesome and home like by the very constant movement of its meager population, by the non-institutional influences of the larger work of which it is but an incident.