well-managed institutions. The boys here as well as in the great establishment at Westboro', in Massachusetts, which I visited with the S.s, last autumn, are treated according to the same plan. They are kept in these establishments but a few months, receive instruction and are well disciplined, and then are placed out in good families in the country, principally in the West, where there is plenty of room for all kinds of working people.
The Sailors' Home is an institution set on foot by private individuals, and intended to furnish a good home, at a low price, to seamen of all nations, during the time that they remain in the city and their vessels in harbour; I visited it in company with Mrs. Hale, the author of “Miriam,” a lady with a practical, intellectual brow, and frank, and most agreeable manners. She is now occupied in the publication of a work on the position of women in society, a work not sufficiently liberal in its tendency, according to my opinion.
Of all the public institutions which I visited I was least satisfied with the great Philadelphia Poor House, an immense establishment for about three thousand persons, which costs the city an immense sum, and yet which cannot possibly answer its purpose. Everything is done too much in a massive, manufacturing way; the individual becomes lost in the mass, and cannot receive his proper degree of attention. The lazy mendicant receives as much as the unfortunate, the lame and the blind, and they cannot have that individual care which they require. At least, so it appeared to me. Neither did it seem to me that the guardian spirit of the place was so generous and so full of tenderness as in the other institutions, and I failed to find places of repose under the open sky, with trees and green space and flowers for the aged. The little court with a few trees was nothing to speak of. For the rest, the institution was remarkable for its order and cleanliness, which are distinguishing
