Louisa Lee Schuyler organized and for fifty years energized and directed the work of the New York State Charities Aid Association which made over into humane and intelligent social care-taking the inherited institutions of a more ignorant and indifferent time.

The first woman to serve on the State Board of Charities in New York, Josephine Shaw Lowell, whose motherhood in the family and the state knew no bounds and whose statesmanship comprehended every social relation, is not the last to so serve.

"The lady with the lamp," Florence Nightingale, who pioneered in trained nursing has had many a follower in this as in other countries.

The annals of all charitable agencies show that at every step, whether recognized as responsible members of the body politic or not, women have done the work in large and efficient measure when the state took over a new job of life-saving and of life-nourishment.
In the realm of penology we have moved far from the old private prison into which the noble could cast his enemy and no one question his acts.

We have moved far from the early prison which was easily neglected in all sanitary as in all moral conditions, since it was then only a stopping place, often for a short time only, on the way from court condemnation to hanging or mutilation, flogging or exile.
When the prison became a place for longer sojourn, and sentence to it became in itself a legal punishment, humane men and women began to feel the importance of knowing what went on in the places set aside for offenders against the law, and Howard and others set the tendency toward a more humane and reasonable treatment of criminals.