provide help, do good to one's neighbour especially by educating youth, taking care of them during the most dangerous years of their lives, educating them in the sciences and arts and leading them to practise religion and virtue. The Congregation does not refuse to take care of any class of people, but it prefers the middle and of poorer classes since these are the ones mostly in need of help and

assistance”.708

Don Bosco was an ambassador for his own undertakings, and during the last years of his life and particularly during his historic trips to France and Spain, would come up with more engaging and definitive formulations of his system and its objectives, through the many talks and conferences. These would but confirm and further explain things.

In a letter to the Cooperators in January 1880, Don Bosco presented a complete list of the institutions he had set up on behalf of youth at risk:“Recreational parks, oratories, Sunday schools, evening schools, day schools, hospices, boarding schools, educational institutions… all open for the public benefit in Italy, France, America”.709

In April, 1882, Don Bosco offered further explanation in Lucca: “Many thousands of youngsters in more than 100 houses receive a Christian education; they are instructed, introduced to learning an art or skill which will help them earn their bread honestly... Charitable contributions are used to prepare these children for civil society, so they may become either good Christian workers or faithful soldiers or exemplary masters and teachers or priests and even missionaries who might bring religion and civilization to barbarians”.710

Don Bosco gave a talk at the Cooperators' meeting in Turin, on June 1,l885: “He seemed very tired and his voice was soft. As he was telling the Cooperators about Salesian undertakings, he emphasised the reasons why they should be supported:

Because they educate youth to pursue virtue, the way leading to the Sanctuary; because

their main goal is that of instructing youth who today have become the target of wicked

people; because in their boarding schools, hospices, festive oratories, their families they

promote, in the midst of the world theypromote, I repeat: love of religion, good morals,

prayer, frequent reception of the Sacraments”.711

As a consequence, it is not possible to reduce Don Bosco's practical interests to only one category of person, namely “poor and abandoned youth”.

Don Bosco's active interests encompasses a whole network of young people, a rather broad one which has the restricted and diverse world of delinquents at its lower level, those who needed to be corrected, those who had had to deal with the courts; there was the less-defined world of the almost-

unredeemable, by using only preventive discipline. These youngsters could be harmful to many of the youth he had the intention of caring about the most.

Looking at higher levels, in principle, at least as far as the boarding schools and the hospices were concerned, boys from upper-class (financial or noble status) families were excluded. These youngsters would have found themselves ill-at-ease in relatively 'cheap' institutions as far as buildings, food, cultural activities, general tone of life were concerned.712

708Regolamento per le case della Società di S. Francesco di Sales. Turin, Salesian Print Shop 1877, part 2, Chap 1, Scopo

delle case della Congregazione di S. Francesco di Sales, p. 59, OE XXIX 155.

709BS 4 (1880) no 1 Jan, p. 1; information follows on works of various kinds in Italy, France, Argentina, inclouding the

Patagonian missions (pp. 1-3).

710BS 6 (1882) no. 5, May p. 81.

711BS 9 (1885) no. 7, July, p. 94

712A more detailed research would be needed for individual institutes to detail the purpose and those they were looking

after, their setting, the level and requests of families, the expectations of religious and civil authorities, historical