Seven Bucks A Head: The Scandalous Child Migration Scheme That Built a Nation

In the seven decades between 1869 and 1939, more than 100,000 so-called “gutter children” from institutional care homes in the United Kingdom were shipped to Canada for better lives. But if ever there was a classic case of government-sanctioned philanthropy that went sideways, this was it. Today, we’d condemn this child emigration initiative for what it really was: human trafficking in the guise of philanthropy.

Most home children left Britain reluctantly and were sent to Canada with no say ...