The Royal Orphanage

The royal orphanage was overwhelmed, understaffed and underfunded. The king did what he could, but there was a war on and the royal treasury wasn't exactly overflowing. The barons and dukes and other landowners were willing to fund the royal army, but they tended to grumble when it came to contributing for the care of street urchins and the children of serfs.

One day a wise sage, one of the king's trusted advisors, made what he thought was an important discovery. He had come across a cottage in the woods where an elderly holy woman and two devout sisters lived. In the care of the women were four young orphans. Someone, it seemed, had found a child orphaned in the wars and left it on the holy woman's doorstep. After she took the child in and began to care for it, word got out and the other children were brought to her one by one. The sage was impressed with how happy and well-fed the children seemed and he had an idea.

The sage went to the king and told him about the holy woman and the children in her care. The children, he said, seemed happier and better fed than the children in the royal orphanage. They received more one-on-one attention, more personal care. And, he pointed out, their care cost less per child than what the king was spending in the royal orphanage. "Vow of poverty," he explained. "Makes staffing very cost-effective."

"The situation is clear," the sage said. "The holy woman provides a higher quality of care at a lower cost."

The obvious next step, he said, was to close the royal orphanage and subcontract with the holy woman for the care of all the orphans in the kingdom.

The king found this logic convincing and so the next morning the overpaid bureaucrats who worked in the royal orphanage were given their leave and the 47 children who lived there were marched into the woods, led by the wise sage himself. He knocked on the door and handed the holy woman a bag of gold from the royal treasury. "By decree of the king," he said, "These children are now in your care. This gold is 47 times the annual per-child expense of the orphans you were already raising, so it should be sufficient to cover all your needs. His royal highness thanks you for your cooperation."

And with that the wise sage went back to his studies.

There were rumors, later, that the royal orphanage had been reopened. Somebody said that the holy woman's cottage wasn't big enough to house 51 children, and that she and the two sisters had been forced to hire extra help. With what was left of the gold after she purchased the former royal orphanage, she was only able to hire back two of the former workers there, at half of their former pay. And so most of the children, some said, ended up living in the exact same place, in the care of even more overwhelmed guardians, with slightly less money for food than before.

But the wise sage didn't concern himself with such tales. He had solved one problem and now he was setting about solving another one.