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Of course, we know that our costly and ill-planned alms-house cannot be rebuilt, or much money expended upon alterations. We must make it serve us for years to come, but we must make some changed in its arrangements. There are, exclusive of the portion occupied by the truant school, 33 bedrooms, about 12 by 15 feet in size on average. Single beds are used generally. Thirty rooms are occupied by 69 inmates; three rooms, from necessity, have one occupant only, 11 boys occupy a room 30 by 14 1/2 feet; seven inmates occupy the lower floor; nine truant boys also are on that floor, in their own wing. Ten persons have meals carried to their rooms, six of whom are lodged on the third floor; seven of the 10 could come to their meals if lodged on the first floor. There is but one outside entrance available for the use of 82 persons. If a sick person is brought in suddenly, there is no hospital ward or vacant room. A place is made by crowding still more. The most obvious remedy for the present inconvenience is the removal of the truant school, and taking the valuable space it now fills on the two first stories for alms-house uses. This would also give two large, airy wards for the benefit of infirm persons, who are more easily cared for thus than in separate rooms. Better ventilation and facilities for heating can be had in wards, and it seems strange they should have been left out of the original plan.

The placing out of children in families we strongly recommend. All the most enlightened modern efforts of philanthropists for the benefit of pauper children are in this direction. The payment of a small sum would procure suitable homes for every one of these children. Their average weekly cost of support now, as stated in the municipal register for 1877, is $1.98. Probably $1.50 per week for some and $1 for others would provide every one with a good home in the country. One of this committee recently advertised for a home for a child at $10 per month, and received over 50 applications, many of them from excellent families. Careful visitation, however, by women should be made a safeguard for their good treatment, and the visitor should have no payment except expenses. The great amount of unpaid work already done by state commissions and boards of private charities for the state and towns guaranteed that such workers can be found and trusted. In fact, the payment of such sums generally attracts a poor kind of workers and does not tempt the best ones. Therefore we prefer unpaid service. The children would often be adopted by the families who had become attached to them. The expense would be no greater, and the change would be an inestimable blessing to the children.

We doubt the benefit of the truant school to the boys confined there. They have no yard or systematic outdoor exercise, for want of which their young muscles must suffer, and probably their nervous energy expends itself in unwholesome or mischievous acts. They were having a summer vacation of eight weeks when we were there -- an absurd farce -- equally appropriate to the county jail. It is simply a period of idleness in jail. We believe these boys corrupt one another. All but one whom we saw were very young. That one was a big brutal-looking fellow, apparently the leader, and a bad one, of the others. We ought to have a county truant school, where boys needing discipline can be sent from all our towns. They should have a master and matron also, some industrial training, plenty of wholesome outdoor work and play with drives out satan and fevers. Agricultural labor would be best for them -- gardening and the care of domestic animals -- and they could raise most of their own food. They houses for their use need not be expensive, if the folly of building a palatial mansion of architectural pretensions and absurd inconvenience which have been so much in vogue of late, be avoided.

Another serious evil in the present crowded and ill-arranged building is the mingling of sexes in adjacent rooms, freely accessible to each other without supervision during most of the time, and wholly so at night. When we consider that the men and women so closely lodged together are many of them either demented or depraved in habits of life, it seems hardly probable that great immoralities should not occur. There is every reason to suppose that advantage is taken frequently of such opportunity. The unprotected state, too, of weak-minded women and of little girls must lead to abuses which we shudder to contemplate. The newspapers have lately been giving its shocking reports of abuses and licentiousness in the Maryland alms houses. Probably our own are by no means free from these, and such vile crimes we know have been committed under negligent supervision in some of our prisons and state institutions where the sexes are not carefully separated, and the vicious and weak-minded have opportunity to use abominable practices. This is an important matter, fully appreciated by the persons in charge of our alms-house and it makes the removal of the truant school an imperative necessity. This would permit the two wings to be used for opposite sexes, as is customary in well-ordered institutions.