"What is the influence of the Sunday School on the children?"
"Is the church accomplishing the desired end toward the masses?"
"Practical education and character making for the masses."
Some of the laymen among the colored people, especially the women, are working in similar directions. In 1880, in a small six-room house, a group of these started a Home for Aged and Infirm Colored Women. The present beautiful home on Lexington avenue was built in 1900 at a cost of $42,500. It contains twenty-one rooms, six bath rooms and a hospital room. The furnishings cost about $28,000. Several rooms were furnished by the different Negro women's social clubs. The home is attractive, cheery, clean and well-managed. The Working Girls' Home was similarly started three years ago by some colored women who realized how much it was needed. Girls coming to the city not only found it difficult to get boarding places, but they were sometimes directed to undesirable houses. In three years after it opened, the home had cared for forty to fifty girls. As most of these girls go out to service, they do not remain long at the home, but by paying a dollar a month a girl may store her trunk if she wishes, and may come back there to spend Sundays and other days "out," and to receive her callers. This is an arrangement which is much appreciated by the girls, and its introduction in other places might help solve the servant problem. A few girls who are seamstresses live in the house. They pay $1.25 a week, buy their own provisions, and have the use of the kitchen and gas range. The home has had a struggle financially. Last year the Legislature granted it an appropriation of $3,000 and it moved into a somewhat larger, though still too small house. For this house, by the way, it had to pay thirty-two dollars a month though the rent had formerly been twenty-five and the house had been empty for some time.
The State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs formed five years ago, is raising money to establish a colored orphan's home in New Castle, Pennsylvania. A year ago these twenty-eight clubs had already raised enough to make the first payment on seven acres of land. The Colored Orphans' Home in Allegheny is under white management, and the colored women are ambitious to have one of their own; a colored auxiliary to the Juvenile Court Association was formed in 1906 to care for colored boys and girls between nine and twelve years of age who are brought to the court. The auxiliary also pays board for a group of colored children who are in institutions outside the state. One member is a faithful volunteer at the Juvenile Court.