Assuming proper inspection of admissions and dis charges and vigilance in enforcing the legal, and as far as possible insisting upon the moral, obligation of parents and relatives to support their children, there may still remain in populous communities a large aggregate number of chil dren for whom provision must be made either in institu tions or in foster-homes found for them by state officials or organized agencies. Against the placing-out system has been urged the notorious laxity in selecting homes, with which some societies and institutions have frequently been charged, and the absence of efficient supervision in children who have once been placed. As a natural result it has been practicable for unscrupulous persons to obtain children for improper motives and to exact unrecompensed labor from them with impunity. It is also alleged that the system has lent itself to proselyting on a large scale, especially to the placing of neglected Catholic children from the great cities in Protestant rural homes. Both of these charges, however, relate to incidental abuses of the system rather than to essential features. As a matter of fact, under pressure from the state boards of charities and other outside sources, and by the voluntary adop tion of more approved methods, agencies that have been engaged in placing children in foster-homes have freed themselves to a great extent from just criticism in these particulars.
Two objections, which go more nearly to the foundation of the placing-out system, may be urged. In effect the placing-out system is an attempt to transfer the burden of dependency from the cities to agricultural communities. Applications, it is true, are received from villages and smaller towns, but at least to some extent the placing-out system may be looked upon as a part of the movement back to the land. In so far as it is a part of this movement, it represents a transitional and a rapidly disappearing phase of national life. The burden of de pendence cannot in the long run be shifted success fully in this manner from a commercial and industrial community to one that is agricultural. While many chil dren for whom homes could be found are healthy in mind and body and are of good family stock, many others are in a degree dependent because of crime or indulgence, physical weakness, or inefficiency on the part of parents, traces of which are likely, sooner or later, to be discovered in the offspring. Some of the children have already come to be classed as incorrigible or are abnormal mentally or physically, but even those who are most attractive and desirable must pass through an unproductive period in which they are an economic burden, with comparatively little assurance that they will remain after they have turned the balance and are contributing to the family income more than their cost. It may be that children in the family ought not to be considered a burden. It may be that the compensations from the very beginning out weigh the costs, and yet in the majority of cases of adopted children it is certain that there is a financial burden, and that an appeal must be made to the charitable impulse, or to the sense of loneliness on account of the loss of an own child, or to the prospect of partial rec ompense by services in later years.
Several states, finding that children who have been brought from distant cities have later become public criarges or inmates of reformatories, have passed laws regulating the placing-out of children by foreign societies or non-residents, in some instances requiring local incor poration or the giving of a bond to insure that a child who becomes a public charge will be received by the one who has placed it. This is but one, although the clearest, indication that methods must be devised, whether institu tional or of the placing-out type, that will enable children to be cared for within the community in which they have become dependent, that the larger wealth of the cities must in some way offset directly the greater burden of dependency, that in so far as dependency in children is a result of social maladjustments and abuses, these must be corrected where they exist ; and as a means to that end that their results shall be fully realized by those who reside where they occur. In the long run the community which has a higher standard of family life and a greater margin of average comfort does not render a kindness to the community in which there is a greater amount of misery and distress by removing individuals and relieving the less fortunate community from the consequences of its own shortcomings. Surplus gifts from the community which is in the happier state may indeed be used to correct the evils in neighboring, or even distant, regions, but there should be no levelling down, and no such shifting of burdens and injuries as will endanger the higher standard. On the other hand placing-out agencies as they develop and extend their activities are likely to accept an increasing number of charges from country and village homes ; and if dependent children, whatever their origin, are boarded at the expense of the state or of private charity there is a due equivalent for whatever economic burden is transferred.
A second objection of an even more vital character is that the attempt to find an indefinite number of private families for the children who are charges upon organized charity, or upon public relief, ignores the well-founded modern tendency toward the increased employment of professional skill. To care for dependent children is a more difficult task than to care for the normal children of an average family, difficult as this also is. Oftentimes essential qualities are lacking in the child, and it is a mat ter requiring extraordinary experience and skill to develop them. A trained expert is needed to detect the traces of abnormality and degeneracy. Even for the child who is entirely normal there must be found some substitute for the painstaking attention which fathers and mothers may naturally be expected to give to the development of their offspring.