State Control of Charities and Corrections 7 



School for Girls, the State Sanatorium for Consumptives, and 

 also the State Hospital at Tewksbury and the State Farm at 

 Bridgewater, so far as their sane inmates are concerned. The 

 immediate management of the Lyman and Industrial schools is 

 ^n the hands of a separate board of trustees, and the State Hos- 

 pital and State Farm are also under a single board of trustees. 

 The State Sanatorium also has its own board of trustees. The 

 state board is required to visit the several truant schools of the 

 state, and make report on their condition. It is charged with the 

 care and maintenance of indigent and neglected children coming 

 into its custody through commitment by the courts or otherwise ; 

 and it administers the laws regarding abandoned infants and in- 

 fant boarding-houses. It is required to visit, not only the children 

 in its immediate care and custody, but also "all minor children 

 supported at the expense of any city or town,"^ and a recent law 

 authorizes it to visit and inspect all places where town paupers, 

 whether children or adults, are supported in families. It pre- 

 scribes the form of certificates required of local overseers of the 

 poor in sending paupers to the State Hospital. It may transfer 

 sane pauper inmates from one state charitable institution to an- 

 other, or send them to any state or place where they belong. 

 When local overseers of the poor fail to comply with the law 

 forbidding the retention in almshouses of pauper children over 

 a certain age, the authority vested in said overseers may be exer- 

 cised by the state board to the exclusion of the overseers. In 

 cases of sick state poor supported by cities and towns, and state 

 poor temporarily relieved, as well as in cases of burial, the state 

 board has large administrative authority, including the visitation 

 of the several cities and towns of the commonwealth by its agents. 

 the investigation and decision of settlements of both sane and 

 insane persons, and the auditing of bills of local authorities against 

 the commonwealth. The board is required to prepare, from the 

 returns made by overseers of the poor, tables of paupers sup- 

 ported bv towns, and to "print in its annual report the most im- 

 portant information thus obtained." An act of 1899 requires 



J Public Statutes, chap. 89, sec. 53. 



363 



