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In carefully considering the expense of the institution, I am at a loss to know, in reducing it by cutting down the number of attendants, who it is proposed to dispense with. Shall it be the engineer, or the baker, the three cooks, or the teamster? Are there too many personal attendants to take care of the food and clothing and other property of the State distributed among these irresponsible inmates ? Nineteen of these for eight hundred or nine hundred sick or idiot or infirm or aged or insane or infants, or so intemperate, vicious, or broken down that they cannot live in the outside world; and every one except a few temporary boys, about twelve or fourteen in number, belong to one of these classes. The wages paid these attendants and officers are moderate. That some kind of persons could be found to take their places, there is no doubt. But thirty dollars a month for a training school nurse or male attendant is moderate. So is twenty-five dollars per month for a female attendant to insane, when we consider the excessive number in charge of each attendant. An ignorant, unskilled female servant-girl gets half that sum, and is worth about one-sixth as much for service. Shall we cease to cultivate the farm or garden? Shall we give up repairs? The law of the State allows three dollars and twenty-five cents per week per capita for care of the insane in our State asylums, but there is not much sick-nursing needed for those. The Tewksbury paupers need full as much expense as the insane, and the institution is in fact a great hospital.

I never expected to be ashamed of Massachusetts, but I am now ashamed. This rich and prosperous State, year after year, cries out, "Cut down pauper expense;" and persons are found who point to some of the poorest-kept almshouses in the State as a model for Tewksbury. The taxes are paid in chief by the rich. The poorer class do not pay in taxes even the proportionate cost of the protection by police of their persons and property. For the purpose apparently of justifying this parsimony, gross misstatements are spread upon the columns of every paper in the land; and the proud old Commonwealth receives insult and cries of shame from States like New York and Ohio, when I read in their own recent reports of insane in county almshouses chained naked in outhouses, wallowing in their own excrement, sexes mingling and bearing fruits of shame and neglect time and again.

Most of all, Irish citizens of Massachusetts, legislators and voters, grudge to their own countrymen, and nearly every inmate of Tewksbury is of foreign birth or parentage, largely Irish, -- grudge to these, I say, the poor sum of one hundred and nine dollars per annum per capita when sick or crippled or feeble or infant or insane.

Political feeling should never enter into questions of charity; but if one party asks for a just and fair expenditure, and another calls for meager and inadequate one, in a spirit of niggardly and selfish greed, the God who hears the cry of the poor shall avenge their cause as he did the wrongs of the slave, and the party who goes for the wrong shall surely fall. This report has been written entirely since four P.M. of Friday. No person has previously seen it, or had any knowledge of what I have written; nor has any suggestion been made to me in regard to it. Such as it is, it is all my own. The short time I have had, and my inability to confer with any one about it, writing it alone at my room in a hotel, makes it more imperfect than I could wish. I would have been glad of a week of time at least to write and revise at leisure. It is my wish that my statements should be given to the Legislature as well as to this board; therefore I have given facts known to most of my associates. The attempt to cut clown the appropriation for the State Primary School at Monson fills me with great alarm. I am very familiar with the interior work of that institution, and know that it would be wrong to reduce expense there. If it is ever done, the children would have poor food and clothing, and unsuitable persons in charge. Very cheap service and overworked employees mean always inferior work done. There is much hope for the young, therefore more harm can be done by parsimony at Monson than at Tewksbury. Here, again, we find Irishmen in the Legislature oppressing their own people, and unwilling to spend a fair sum in their care. If the administration of public charity falls into the hands of a governor, there is a danger of office in charitable institutions being made a reward for political service. We have only to turn our eyes to other States to see this actually in practice. The care of the insane and other dependents has been shockingly mismanaged, because committed to politicians. Massachusetts has steadily progressed in the contrary direction, giving the charge of the poor into boards holding long terms of service, and intrusting a portion of the work to women, who have no part in politics, and who work without compensation and from benevolent motives.