There was the day when prison ships lay off New York and in the holds below deck the grip of the Old World squeezed hard for a last time on men of the New.

The horror of it all lingers in the history books and is a contrast. For up beyond the far end of Manhattan, in the hill country of the Hudson, where the woods slope off to Ardsley and Hastings, and a shade-splotched road leads down to Dobb's Ferry and the river, the New York Juvenile Asylum is building at Echo Hills a model village, where the children of such among the immigrants as have been clearly shown to be unfit may get a first firm grasp of things American.

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There is a reality back of this contrast, for during the latter years of its half century of work, the children who have. been committed to the Juvenile Asylum for correctional treatment have come, for the most part, from dense districts of the city which have been given over to the immigrant-tenement and thoroughfare alike and which showed showed less twenty-five per cent of native born white population in the census of 1900. And it is the better to meet this changed need with new ideas that the directors have decided to abandon the cluster of substantial stone buildings on Washington Heights, to which, in the fifty years of the society's activity, 36,000 children have been committed, create a new institution on the "cottage home" plan and face the grave problem of a complete change of system without neglecting the responsibility of the 900 boys and girls who are their present wards.

The causes for such a change will be outlined in succeeding paragraphs. It is not the purpose of this article to enter into an abstract discussion of the care of dependent or delinquent children.1 The more strenuous advocates of the placing-out system will be pleased at the

abandonment of the congregate for the "cottage home" plan of institutional construction, and the putting of new emphasis upon such post-graduate placingout work as will lessen the institutional census. The natural home is clearly the place for the normal child. The reformatory at best is a remedy, and there are those who believe that, like the hospital or the almshouse or, for that matter, the settlement-it would have no place in an ideal society. But under present conditions, the practical question to be met is more often, what sort of an institution would you have?

At one of the sessions of a western legislature, a member attacked an appropriation for a reformatory. He argued that the children in that institution came, for the most part, from the worst districts of the cities. "Don't spend the money of the state building fine institutions for them," he said; "give them such hovels as they are used to and teach them to make the most of them." There is just a hint here of the psychological truth which has been built upon so well at the George Junior Republic. But for the most part this legislative philosophy rises no whit above that described in the nursery rhyme of those who "lived in peace, and died in Greece, and were buried in an old soap barrel." Less radical is the attitude of others, who would make the institution severe in its plainness-a foretaste of what the children may expect once they leave it.

But the distinctive genius of the colony home at Echo Hills will be of an altogether different type from this. For the whole working plan of the new asylum is built up around the central idea of the setting of standards. With their charges, the city street will give place not only to a village of trees and broad grass plots, but an environment rich in man's mas

tery over nature. It is not enough, say the directors, to remove boys and girls from surroundings and companions which have been such as to make their commitment a fact. That is but going half way. They must be given new units of life. You can impersonate a motherhen with old rags, but a brooder of the best citizenship must be of a different sort. In each of the cottages the boys and girls will get as close to a home as, perhaps, an institution can come -a home with much of the beauty of the word in it. And in the community life grouped about the village green at Echo Hills, they will catch something of civic spirit, of the ideals of neighborliness, and of effective social co-operation. They will learn how a twentieth century community feeds itself, and more, how it can beautify itself how it should be lighted, and what public parks and sewerage systems stand for when properly conducted things which the college grad uate would like to know and is not taught. The idea is capable of infinite development-this idea of a standard, and that the best, running like a fine spun thread through the workaday texture of one life or ten hundred-whether in the cottage home, in the trade which is learned, or in the town life of one's fellows a standard, too, which will be a gauge and goal once they have left Echo Hills.

The adoption of the cottage home plan of institutional construction is by no means a new idea though the fact that the largest Protestant children's institution in America has accepted it is of current interest. During the past quarter of a century the trend in the construction of institutions for delinquent children has been unmistakably in the direction of the segregate as distinguished from the congregate or barrack institution. Perhaps none of the many creations of the period has been constructed on the latter plan, whereas cores of the former type have been erected. New York, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville and St. Louis retain their houses of refuge which were monuments to the philanthropy of fifty years ago, but these are almost the only survivors of the enclosed type of children's institutions that remain in America. The

state institutions in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri and other middle west states as well as those in the Pacific coast tier of commonwealths were organized on modern lines. Perhaps twelve years ago the Philadelphia House of Refuge was converted into a village at Glen Mills and similar treatment was accorded the Boston institution now at Westboro.

The New York Orphan Asylum was transformed last year, the Canadian institution and one in Baltimore are about to adopt the cottage plan, a cottage home for girls has been authorized by the legislature of Indiana and one for boys by the legislature of Illinois, the reform school at Rochester will be succeeded by a village of cottages in a rural section of New York state, and the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society will remove from its location on Manhattan Island as soon as its wards can be suitably sheltered in a school on modern lines.

In the fifty-one years of its ministrations in the field of charity, the New York Juvenile Asylum has trained, educated and maintained nearly thirty-eight thousand children, almost exclusively children of Greater New York, six thousand of whom were provided homes in western states. Several years ago the directors resolved to relinquish their realty holdings in New York city. Playgrounds were being partitioned by streets and avenues; assessments for improvements were becoming prohibitive; and the swelling building tide was advancing and threatening to deprive them of the isolation so essential to best results.

A systematic and exhaustive investigation of conditions in their particular field was inaugurated by the members of the board, and data obtained by correspondence was supplemented by scientific reports of observations by members of the board who visited European and American institutions. The conclusions of the committee were set forth in a statement, the adoption of which a few years ago committed the management to the cottage system. Subsequently a fine old Hudson River estate of two hundred and seventyseven acres was purchased and five architectural firms were invited to prepare sketches of appropriate buildings, and in