Refuges and Schools for neglected Children.

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the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who gets so many millions by this liquor traffic, has to sustain his measures and poise his arguments on assertions implying that public-houses are nothing better than pests and nuisances. With such convictions pervading and moulding the thoughts and reasonings of our politicians and statesmen, the time cannot be far distant when the Parliament of this great Anglo-Saxon people, will come to the logical and patriotic conclusion to abolish a system that pauperizes, degrades, and destroys millions, whilst it can confer no real benefit upon any portion of the community; a system that cannot be defended upon any grounds consistent with morality, social progress, or national prosperity; a system that has been emphatically condemned by the teachings of history, the lessons of experience, and the conclusions of social science.

The liquor traffic must no longer be placed in the category of useful trades or legitimate commerce. It is a social excrescence, a legal anomaly, a crime; and if intelligence and moral ideas are to rule and guide us as a people and nation, the law must be adjusted, so as to stand in its true and proper relation to this system of corruption and temptation. It must not be fostered, even for the sake of revenue; it must not be protected or sanctioned by law in any form; but like lotteries, betting-houses, and brothels, our public drinking-houses must be put under the ban of the legislature; and until this can be accomplished by our imperial enactments, taking effect at once and all over the country, the practical and excellent suggestion of the United Kingdom Alliance should be adopted, to enable the people of each district, as soon as public opinion in the locality is ripe for action, to put a veto upon the issue of licenses for the sale of intoxicating liquors, for purposes of common beverage. Such a proposal as this, so fair and practically reasonable, and so entirely in harmony with the good old Saxon principle of local self-government, cannot but be approved of by every wise and manly spirit, actuated by patriotic sentiments, a love of justice, and an aspiration for sober liberty and social progress.

ART. V.-1. Reformatory Schools for the Children of the Perishing and Dangerous Classes. By Mary Carpenter. 1851. 2. Juvenile Delinquents and their Treatment. By Mary Carpenter. 1853.

3. The Cry of Ten Thousand Children, or Cruelty towards the Young. By the Rev. W. C. Osborn, Chaplain of the Bath Gaol. 1860.

4. The Preservation of Youth from Crime, a Nation's Duty; or, Children's Rights. By the Rev. W. C. Osborn. 1860.

5. The Non-Imprisonment of Children. Nos. 1 and 2. (Legal Enactments suggested and advocated.) By the Rev. W. C. Osborn.

6. The Bird's Nest: a few Words to Little Children. London: Wertheim and Macintosh.

7. Exposé de la Situation des Ecoles de Réforme, de Ruysselede, de Wynghene, et de Beernem. Par Ed. Ducpetiaux. Bruxelles.

1861.

IF

F there be any persons sufficiently poetical in this utilitarian age to believe in the Jewish doctrine of guardian angels, it may have occurred to them to reflect how incomprehensible must appear, to those celestial beings, the different treatment bestowed by this world upon gifts which are alike valuable and good. The birth of some immortal creature is hailed as an auspicious event, to be ushered in with exclamations of joy and triumph. From his cradle to his tomb, he is petted, cajoled, and cherished in luxury, and the Way of the Crown' is seldom to him the Way of the Cross.' Some infant heads are pillowed on soft arms; a mother's beaming face suns them with smiles, as first they nestle, warm with life, close to a heart whose every pulsation may be a throb of love, or an unconscious prayer for the little one confided to her keeping. As soon as the child is able to exercise its faculties, and to choose the sweet instead of the bitter, it may be reared in an atmosphere of kindness, and may listen to holy songs in hours of the deepening twilight, whilst as the moral training is carefully preceding the mental, the thorns may be cautiously eradicated from the tender soil, before the good seed is planted to take root in the well-watered ground.

But others, equally tender and innocent, are received coldly and scornfully by an earth which cradles them in indigence and shame. Sometimes they are dandled on the drunkard's knees, or taught to falter their first words from the lips of the foul blasphemer. Sometimes they are orphaned and desolate; and when their young lives are not taken away by want and fever, they are left to waste with hunger, or to stretch their tiny hands in vain.' Or worse, they are stung as with scorpions' by their parents' vices, and left poor foundlings on the charity of an unfeeling world. Hungry and sad, they wander up and down, nursed by the chilly fingers of grim want, and taught by cruel care or by hard words and blows: their young hearts aching with unnatural voids, their heritage a tainted fame, their lessons laws of sin, and oaths for prayers."

6

The early lives of some men are filled with innocent pleasure.
Their childhood

That hath more power than all the elements."
Sits upon a throne

They

They learn of love from sunshine and from flowers, inhaling health and freedom from pure air. They behold goodness and virtue through an attractive halo, and

Worship at the temple's inner shrine,

God being with them when we know it not.'

Theirs is the knowledge which is not purchased by the loss of power,' and they are reared in happy ignorance of what is called the world, and the world's ways.' But pauper children have no time for healthy play. Their bodies and souls are crushed by the great Juggernaut of human labour, and their young faces wear the painful look of an unnatural age. They creep about in crowded thoroughfares, or hide in dens of guilt, dreaming of sights which they may never see, or leaning their cheeks upon their poor tired hands. They pine in stifled alleys or dark rooms, fevered by summer heat, or starved by cold; and this dark view is all God's world to them. With quick obedience they learn the lessons they are taught by men; their baby lips lisp out the drunkard's curse, or their ears drink in the hateful sounds which they afterwards repeat as brave tokens of a reckless independence. With tottering feet they are turned out to lie and steal; with eager readiness they hasten to the only work they know; and when in the course of years the world is heaping its rewards upon the head of some young scion of an honoured family, the same outraged society is vindicating its rights, by thrusting these criminal outcasts, whose degradation is owing to its own neglect, into greater depths of wretchedness, driving them to that despair which is the paralysis of the soul, branding them with the felon's brand, pointing at them the finger of scorn, and casting them in shameful exile, as poisonous refuse, from the Fatherland.

6

Such is the contrast which has often afforded scope to the pencil of poet or painter. It is an old subject, and we know it so well, that we pass it by with a sigh of something like impatience. The fool hath said there is no God;' but none there is no sorrow. The existence of trouble around us in this world is such an universally-admitted truth, that we try to drown its voice in the excitement of business, or to ward off the phantom at arm's length by newly-devised pleasures. There is undoubtedly much selfishness in this easy indifference to those sufferings which do not come beneath our immediate notice; yet to listen always to the sighs of this goaded world' would be more than mortal could bear. We might often have the keen edge taken from our greatest enjoyments by the pang of unwelcome reminiscences, or we might be embittered in our dearest affections by the fear of human hollowness.

Mercy has decreed otherwise. Sympathy in its highest form cannot be known upon earth; and it is well for us that it should

be

be so.

For it is only the unfallen angels who can look upon the blackness of an evil heart with eyes in which all hatred and aversion are drowned by the dews of love. It is only the souls of the blessed who float in the ocean of perfect happiness, comprehending all the height and depth of inconceivable mercy, who can dare to look down the deep abyss of sin and suffering, and recognize the justice of the Almighty in the disposal of every fate. Sufferings,' it has been said, are knowledge, enabling us to act from experience.' There is a tendency in many a life-education, combined with our natural English stoicism, to deaden the feelings and to harden the heart, and nothing is more likely to forward this hardening process than the habit of constantly hearing or witnessing evil which we are unable to remedy or oppose. pressing wants of a large and ignorant class of the community, and the terrible facts or statistics which are mooted in every newspaper, are miseries which must be recognized and deplored, but they should at the same time be subjected to an active remedial process. There is a vast difference between that comfortable familiarity with physical and moral wretchedness which is the attribute of savages, and the self-denying courage which incites the philanthropist to explore the recesses of woe, that by vigorous effort he may narrow the field of poverty and crime. In the latter case, it is the active feeling of opposition which excludes the presence of callous indifference.

The

Now perhaps there is no subject on which the feelings of people have been more harrowed of late than this question of juvenile delinquency. The importance of the young is declared to be at its maximum at present, and there is said to be a marked tendency, in all sentimental writers of the present day, to draw their most touching scenes from the nursery or the schoolroom. People are dinned with the adjective educational,' and wearied with fresh hobbies for working on the susceptible emotions of tender adolescence. And yet it remains a startling fact that in the metropolis of the British empire, and in all portions of our religious and benevolent country, there lurk thousands of miserable and degraded children, as ignorant as Hottentots of all rules of social life, destitute, and outcast from the nation and the church, who, having no law, are a law unto themselves,' and who are yet punished by the civilized community for sins which they never committed. Society is puzzled by the paradox of a large class continually growing up in its centre in a state of savage ignorance, with no better influences around it than those of loose life, unruly passions, and diseases pale.' A Government averse to any interference with the rights of the individual, and jealous of the least approach to foreign centralization, can only be shocked at the anomaly. And so, amidst the vaunted progress

of

Eloquence of Facts.

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of the age, and the spread of scientific improvement, amidst the encroaching and refining processes which prune our gnarled old branches, and lop our straggling hedges, the lovers of unconventional and uncivilized human nature can still study this bit of wild and independent life. The 'Lazzaroni have not more slang, the Niggers are not more saucy, and the Feejees are not so ignorant, as these little Bedouins of our London streets; and so there comes to be a vast deal of nonsense written and talked about the naïve peculiarities of our street Arabs. And truly as the deepest tragedy is always veering on the irresistibly comic, a lover of the ludicrous might find much to tickle him in the solemn paraphernalia of justice arrayed against a diminutive urchin, who raises himself on tiptoe to bring his eyes on a level with the bar; or perhaps has to be elevated on a table to help him into view of the judge, but who upsets the gravity of the court by his shrill and impertinent answers, or boldly declares his ambition for the final honour of transportation.* Such cases may only too clearly manifest the mockery or utter hopelessness of attempting to deal with such creatures in the imposing forms of law.'

And yet in a reaction of sentimental benevolence, when stern rules of right and wrong are apt to be disliked as harsh and severe, we must not allow ourselves to be misled by the capricious or unsteady convictions of impulse. We must remember that sensibility and justice are ever to be correlatives of each other, and that it is dangerous to yield to the dictates of feeling which are not regulated by law. The stern old-fashioned language which was wont to speak of evil as a thing to be hated and abhorred, (calling as honest John Knox said, 'a fig, a fig; and a spade, a spade,') is a hundred times better than that maudlin charity or cruelty in disguise, which looks upon sin merely as a misfortune, which is for breaking down the barriers which protect society from degradation, and which tries the homoeopathical treatment in instances of moral disease, petting instead of punishing in cases where a peculiar temperament or circumstances of life are supposed to have increased the temptation to crime.

From the time when Tom Hood electrified the British public with his stern denunciation upon the heads of the guilty rich for their criminal neglect to the oppressed and untaught poor,

*It would be important if, in the education of ragged children, the distinction could be brought prominently forward between that moral courage which will enable a man to brave disgrace for the cause of virtue or religion, and that physical courage which is sometimes dependent on the absence of sensibility, as may be the attribute of the savage. It is the same bravado and love of adventurewhich is applauded as a mark of spirit among the children of the rich, which causes many a destitute boy to commence a course of crime, and to brave all consequences in a fit of frantic excitement. The idolatry of the English for mere courage and strength leads many an untaught child to form crude notions of right and wrong.

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