In order that the colonists should not completely lose touch with the outside world, but should in some measure be prepared for the social exigencies of their future lives, the colony is organised like a miniature town. The children, boys and girls, are divided into so many families, each consisting of ten or twelve members presided over by two adults, who take the place of parents and look after the household. The greater part of the population is engaged in agriculture, in cultivating the land belonging to the Republic, but a certain proportion adopt the arts and crafts necessary to every community: joinery, book-binding, printing, shoemaking, or shop-keeping. The colony coins its own money and possesses a bank run by the boys themselves, where the colonists can deposit their savings. All labour and produce are paid for separately. The colony has its own laws sanctioned by its Parliament, its Tribunal, the members of which, chosen from amongst the citizens, are charged with enforcing the laws. The Parliament, composed without distinction of sex, of boys and girls, decrees the holidays, organises the games and entertainments, and establishes the public expenditure, revenue, and taxes, etc. (see Figs. 19 and 20).
The results of this system appear to be excellent; most of the ex-colonists have turned out well, and in view of this fact, republics on similar lines are being organised in various parts of the United States. This Republic admits only children over twelve, who remain in the colony about three years.
PREVENTIVE INSTITUTIONS FOR DESTITUTE ADULTS
Besides institutions for the careful training of the young, methods for preventing crime also include all attempts to help young or adult persons at any crisis in their lives when they are friendless and out of work, for it is precisely then that they are most exposed to temptation.
People's hotels, shelters for emigrants or strangers, reading-rooms, inexpensive but wholesome entertainments, evening classes for instruction in manual work, labour bureaus, organisations for assisting emigrants, etc., are the most efficacious institutions of this kind. And in this connection, I must refer to the work done by the Salvation Army, which from what I was able to observe in America, seems to me the best organised of all existing benevolent associations, since by means of a thousand arms it reaches every form of poverty and misery and seeks to make all its institutions self-supporting. It fights drunkenness by lectures, recreation rooms, and temperance hotels; it fights poverty by investigating each individual case of destitution, visiting poor families, dispensing sympathy and help, providing shelter for the night at a minimum price and industrial homes for those who are out of work. Sometimes the rooms are turned into recreation halls for drunkards or industrial schools for the girls of poor mothers who are obliged to go out to work, or temporary hospitals for some urgent case which, owing to bureaucratic formalities, the hospitals are unable to attend to immediately, or rooms with moving pictures for friendly gatherings on holidays, thus grafting one benevolent work on to another so as to obtain the best results at the smallest cost.