Indeed the benefits from segregation are so marked and so convincing that the policy has been extended to different conditions in the same class. This is particularly noticeable in the modern treatment of consumptives, for whom special hospitals are constructed and spe cial diet prepared. And yet the subject has not been exhausted. It is susceptible of further de velopment and closer application. There is a crying need for it in the care of helpless old persons, in the treatment of whom the causes of destitution and the moral character of the individual should always be considered. The demonstrated advantages of segregation may be summed up in the more intelligent attention that each class receives and in the choice of per sons entrusted with the care of dependents, made with no other purpose in view than fitness for the position to be occupied. Poverty is not a crime, and the victims of poverty are no longer classed with criminals. As already mentioned the state has not always recognized this principle. On the contrary, its theory and its practice formerly forced the poverty stricken individual into association with the criminal. In the last quarter of the 19th cen tury convicted criminals wearing the uniform of the penitentiary were employed as nurses in public hospitals. When the force of union la bor had driven prisoners as laborers out of the public streets, out of the public parks, off public works and from every other place where public moneys were expended for the improve ment of the general community, prisoners wear ing prison garb were retained as workmen in the public charitable institutions. At a time when it would have meant a race riot to have placed prisoners to care for the trees in the parks, to clean the cobblestones in the streets, or even to look after the sewers, the sick poor man, the helpless imbecile and the abandoned child were left in part to the care of convicts. This was done in the name of charity, but it was such a rank in1ustice to the individual, such a blot on the civilization of the community, that the long-growing and firmly founded convic tion of earnest students of sociology rebelled against it and, by energetic insistence, won, step by step, a victory over such conditions.
The first great move toward the separation of the dependent poor from criminals was made in the introduction of the trained nurse into the public hospitals. It was potent in its in fluence and appealed so strongly to the sense of justice of all communities that to-day every hospital, public or private, has its corps of trained nurses; and the fact that once the place held by the trained nurse was held by a con vict in prison garb is regarded as a barbaric horror. With the elimination of the convict as a nurse in the public hospitals, the cause of progress and reform was encou to ex tend its efforts to the elimination7:rison la bor in all public charitable institutions. The battle was not an easy one, but the adherents of reform never wavered.. The divorce between the prisoner and the pauper to-day is complete in almost every civilized community.
Public sentiment has also gone deep into the study of the condition of children, looking always to the best chance to develop a depend ent child, or a criminal child, into a good citi zen. It recognized that environment is a pow erful factor in the development of character, and one of its chief endeavors has been to dis associate the plastic mind of childhood from impressions that would tend to retard reform in a child already started on the downward path, as well as to protect a child not contam inated by vicious surroundings from influences tending to contaminate it. The crowning work of this endeavor was the establishment of children's courts, wherein the cases of children charged with crime are tried, free from even the sight of adult criminals. See CHARITY OR