Reformers continued to worry about the children of the poor when it gradually became apparent that neither child labour laws nor compulsory school attendance laws were really succeeding in bringing about their improvement. Child welfare activities took various forms, one of which was publicizing the plight of poor and neglected children. This composite photograph "The process of evolution," illustrates the impact of early anthropology on the thought of many reformers. Men like G. Stanley Hall, one of North America's first child psychologists, popularised the doctrine of the recapitulation of the species. Each individual was supposed to repeat the historical evolution of humanity in his or her own progress through childhood and adolescence. Poor children, it may have been thought, had further to go than others but, if this was the case, nineteenth-century reformers wanted to help them. The poor too would achieve "civilization"; with the assistance of agencies like the Children's Aid Society they would be transformed into models of middle-class respectability. As such, they were living examples of evolution or "progress" as nineteenth-century men and women understood it.
