Some Conditions of Child Life in England — A Closer Reading

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.