continued until the age of 18 was reached.  For nearly 14 years, from 1872 to 1886, the Boarding-out Society pursued its modest labours as auxiliary to the Destitute Board.  Our volunteer visitors reported in duplicate—­one copy for the official board, and one for the unofficial committee.  When the method was inaugurated, Mr. T. S. Reed.  Chairman of the Board, was completely won over.  We had nothing to do with the reformatories. except that our visitors went to see those placed out at service in their neighbourhood.

Our success attracted attention elsewhere.  The late Dr. Andrew Garran, who was on The Register when I went to England, had moved to Sydney in my absence, and was on the staff of The Sydney Morning Herald.  When Miss Clark went to England in 1877, after her mother`s death, Dr. Garran wrote to me for some account of our methods. and of their success, physical, moral, and financial.  Dr. Garran came out with Mr. G. F. Angas and the Australian Constitution in 1851 in search of health and work, both of which he found here.  The first pages of my four volumes of newspaper cuttings are filled with two long articles, “The Children of the State,” and this started the movement in New South Wales, led by Mrs. Garran, nee Sabine, and Mrs. Jefferis wife of the leading Congregational minister, moved from Adelaide to Sydney.  Professor Henry Pearson asked me a year or two later to give similar information to The Melbourne Age.  Subsequently I wrote on this subject, by request, to Queensland, New Zealand, and I think also Tasmania, where we were imitated first, but where there are still to be found children of the State in institutions.  In Victoria and New South Wales a vigorous policy emptied these buildings, which were used for other public purposes, and the children were dispersed.  The innovation which at first was scouted as utopian, next suspected as leading to neglect, or even unkindness—­for people would only take these children for what they could make out of them—­was found to be so beneficial that nobody in Australia would like to return to the barrack home or the barrack school.  If the inspection had been from the first merely official, public opinion would have been suspicious and sceptical, but when ladies saw the children in these homes, and watched how the dull faces brightened, and the languid limbs became alert after a few weeks of ordinary life—­when the cheeks became rosier, and the eyes had new light in them; when they saw that the foster parents took pride in their progress at school, and made them handy about the house, as they could never be at an institution, where everything is done at the sound of a bell or the stroke of a clock—­these ladies testified to what they knew, and the public believed in them.  In other English-speaking countries boarding-out in families is sometimes permitted; but here, under the Southern Cross, it is the law of the land that children shall not be brought up in institutions, but in homes: