Chapter I

What, then, should His followers think of such deeds as these, taken more or less at random, from the list of offences for which, through the action of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, by its London Committee alone, two hundred men and women have been tried and convicted?

Making an ill and dying step-child live in a damp, dark back-kitchen, while the "own" children in the front kitchen sit round a bright winter's fire; shutting up another step-child to sleep in the coal-cellar, three others to sleep next the unceiled roof with one quilt, in their night-gowns, wind and sleet and rain finding them; sending a child at ten o'clock on a February night, recovering from diphtheria, a mile to an inn for beer; sending two starved, almost naked, little girls for half a hundredweight of coals in rain and sleet twice the same December night; laying a baby close to the fire to get rid of it through thirst; putting another in a thorough draft to get rid of it through cold; leaving a girl in bed covered with sores, infested with lice, under one scab a maggot, never washed or tended, lying in her own excrements; strapping a deaf and dumb boy because it was so extremely difficult to make him understand; drawing a red-hot poker before the eyes of a blind girl, and touching her hands with it (this was done by her brutal brother, but in the presence of the parents, and for fun); after beating, locking-up for the night in a coal-cellar with rats; immersing a dying boy in a tub of cold water, "to get his dying done;" making another dying boy get out of bed to help to wash, and knocking him down because he washed so little; breaking a girl's arm while beating her with a broomstick, then setting her to scrub the floor with the broken arm folded to her breast, and whipping her for being so long about it; hanging a naked boy by tied hands from a hook at the ceiling, there flogging him; savagely beating a girl on her breasts, felling her with fist, then kicking in the groin, on the abdomen, and the face with working boots; lashing a three-year-old face and neck with drayman's whip; a three-year-old back with whalebone riding-whip; throttling one boy, producing partial strangulation; thrusting the knob of a poker into the throat of another, and holding it there to stop his screams of pain?

"Once I saw her put the poker in the fire," said a neighbour (speaking of an own mother and her child of four and a half), "to get it red-hot. The child had vexed her. She held him down to the bed, and tied a cloth round his mouth; when the poker was hot she lifted his little petticoats up, and held the poker on the bottom of his back." One baby cooed in the cradle, and was startled with a loud thunderous curse; one cried of teething, and was beaten savagely with its father's big hand; two did the same, and were strapped, hanging by the heels from the strapper's hand. Besides canes, straps, whips, and boots, belts, and thongs of rope, the instruments of torture have been hammers; pokers, cold, and red-hot; wire toasting-forks--in one case the prongs of the fork hammered out, the stem untwisted a little up, making a sort of a birch of frayed wire; a file, with which the skin on projecting bones had been rasped raw; a hot stove, on which the child's bare thighs were put; hot fire-grates, against which little fat hands were held.

Never were even churches put to such Christian purposes as were Her Majesty's prisons, when they held the doers of such deeds as these, and were making their backs to well ache with hard labour.

You are shocked at that horrible catalogue. But is it not strange that in not one of all these cases did anybody, who was troubled about them, ever think of going to tell a minister of the gospel--you people who claim to be the successors of the man of Nazareth? Nor did they go to a City missionary! Of the 1400 cases sent into the office of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in London during its five years' existence, not one has come from a City missionary. When speaking of the starvation of children to one of them, he said to me, "Yes, I knew two cases last winter, one after another; they were just starved to death. It was a shocking affair." To which I replied, in surprised indignation, "Why did you not tell us?" "Oh," he replied with a perfectly satisfied air, "if I were to meddle in things like that, I could not do my more spiritual work."

"I know several children marked for death," said a London vicar's daughter, and his district visitor, the other day, "but I cannot give their parents' names. We should be subject to such persecution if we were to interfere." The fact that

There's a friend of little children,
Above the bright blue sky,

ought to fall like a warning thunderbolt out of heaven on such people's ears! I have repeated these two sayings, because they speak volumes on the "religious" surroundings of tortured child life in England. Both of them referred to children being deliberately starved to death.

I will give you a sample of the condition in which some of these starved children, unseen, and quietly, die.

It was in winter, in a bare room. The child, a girl of seven, lay on a mattress, had but two garments on: a chemise and a print frock. There was no blanket, no coverlet, no sheet. The window was curtainless; the nights were frosty. There was no fire in the grate, nor had there ever been through all the long illness. There was no food, no physic, not even a cup of water to drink. Her bones almost protruded through the bed-sores, which added misery to her misery. She lay with her eyes shut all day, occasionally moistening with her dry tongue her still drier lips. Downstairs sat the pair with whom she had lived from her birth--her father and mother. They brought her no share of their tea nor crumb of their bread. They had blankets for _their_ beds, and fire for _their_ meals. Their house was still. You pass a door like theirs; all is clean. The curate nods as he goes by; and the district visitor calls; and the child hears the church bell on Sundays, till she can hear it no more. For she is starving to death in a Christian country.

It is little children who are made most to suffer.

The ages of the victims of the most atrocious cases is almost always low. Nor are small families exempt. The size of families in which the most horrible outrages take place is never large, being mostly two, or even one. Poverty is never great. Dwellings are often miserable enough, though not always that. Two pounds ten a week and three pounds a week are received by artisans whose one room for the family costs four and sixpence per week, and even this a toiling wife has in some cases to pay. But some live in "Model Dwellings." Neither is it ignorance, in the common meaning of ignorance, which tends to produce cruelties to children. Skilled artisans, with a smattering of knowledge beyond their class, considering the proportion they bear to the common run of labourers, are in excess in number and obstinacy of cases. Nor does higher social position exempt from this evil. Some of the cruel are industrious, and some are idle. Some drink, some do not. Some can talk of protoplasm; and some cannot spell their own names.

The truth of the matter is, that cruelty is wholly independent of surroundings and wages. It is the work of haters of children; of sullen, pitiless, intolerant, dispositions; of men whom there is no pleasing, who resent tiny baby's little blunderings, or even pretty ways with all the physical power of a grown man, in manners which, if shown by an officer of justice to a convict, would excite the indignation of the whole country.

It is impossible, within my limits, to do justice to the work the new Society has had to do for drunkard's children, tramp children, stolen children; acrobats and performing children; step-children, little hawkers, and friendless apprentices; children insured and in baby farms.

As regards our "baby farms," many of them would be a scandal to a savage land: they are mere baby shambles. And as regards infantile insurance, that is worse. While in the baby farm, where a child is killed for profit, it is a stranger who kills, in the bad family, where it is killed for insurance money, it is the parent who kills. Neither here in this matter, nor in the statements I have already made, do I make charges against English parents. Most of them would die rather than injure, or even neglect, their child. But there are un-English parents, tens of thousands of them, who, for "a drink," pawn their baby's only garment and leave it foodless in a fireless room. To these, insurance money can be nothing else than a motive for more or less passive child murder. And other types, it familiarises with the idea of baby's death and of getting old scores paid off when it happens; which in the insured child's ailments acts as an incitive to the reverse of whole hearted care for its life. The system itself is a kind of gambling: a parent bets a penny a week against the insurer's thirty shillings that his child won't live. The insurer's chances are, the general good character of the English parent, and the known penalties of the law for murder.

I regret that I cannot inform you that all these wronged children are black, and their wrong-doers, heathen inhabitants of heathen lands; that we have founded a missionary Society to send missionaries to these demons of wickedness, in Africa or New Guinea. I regret it chiefly because it is such a shame to us all that these things exist in our own beloved land; but I regret it, still more, because you will, I fear, care the less to remedy it.