[-211-]
CHAPTER II.
EVERYBODY'S CHILDREN.
Juvenile Vagrants - Known to the Police - The Advantage of becoming a Thief - There and back again - From School to College - ' Wild Boys of London' - The Devil's Primers - Last ' New gate Calendar' - The Unions that empty the Gaols - Sheer Destitution - Homeless but not Nameless - Polynomination - Sensational Appeals and spasmodic Responses - The most terrible Sight in the World - A Cure for some of London's Curses - Heave Ho! - The noblest Ship on the silent Highway - A new Land Question - Over Seas - Brother Jonathan's long Arm and warm Heart - Two Dinner-Parties in two Great Cities - Absent Friends - Soho-way - Newport Market - A Club-Token - Little Sisters - Lost/ - A dark Door in the ' Dog Row' - Homeless AND Nameless - Rescue and Rest - The Woodhouse Dovecot.
IF the question, ' What shall we do with our roughs?'
is difficult to answer in reference to the adult criminals
of the metropolis, it offers a still less soluble problem if
we include among the ' dangerous classes' those juvenile [-212-]
vagrants who are graduating in ruffianism, and eventually join the ranks of the recognised felons. The
difficulty in their case is greater, inasmuch as they cannot as a rule be classified; and the law which commits
the miserable little street Arab who pilfers an apple
from a market-basket, or picks up an oyster that has
fallen from a porter's sack, to the same punishment
which awaits the most forward pupil of some school for
youthful pickpockets, gives us few data for any methodical calculation. Of the thousands of wretched children
who every year pass through our metropolitan prisons -
many of them to be re-committed for a more glaring
offence as they improve upon the lessons taught them
by the law itself - it is certain that a large proportion are
scarcely responsible for the crime which has brought
them before the magistrate.
They are a drifting, destitute part of the floating
population, living anyhow, sleeping anywhere, moved on,
moved off, eating any kind of refuse when they are
hungry, begging when they cannot afford to spend two-
pence on a few boxes of cigar-lights as their stock-in-
trade. Sometimes they are employed by male or female
cadgers, who furnish them with lucifer - matches or
bunches of faded flowers, and set them to whine for alms
in the more frequented thoroughfares, watching from
some remote corner, to which they are compelled to take
their gains every hour, and where they receive a scanty
scrap of food and the promise of a sack of shavings in
the corner of a foul room where they may rest their
weary little limbs for the night.
[-
213-]
Of two facts these destitute creatures are always conscious - that they are sure to be hungry to-morrow;
and that nobody would give them work to do even if
they knew how to do it.
They live under a perpetual sense of being a superfluous part of the universe.
The mother who left them long ago to the tender
mercies of the streets, the unknown father who deserted
her or died in some hospital ward, never revealed to
them that they were outlawed by society from their
very birth; but the knowledge that they are suspected,
hunted, perpetually warned off from the very influences
of respectability, neglected, starved, tempted to crime,
and finally caught and sent to prison, grows with their
growth and ripens with their years.
The first remarkable stage of this knowledge is that
they are of no importance whatever until they become
known as criminals. Let society, in the shape of the
police and the representatives of law and justice, once
recognise them as hardened offenders, and they are
treated with a consideration which, had it been accorded
to them while they were innocent and merely destitute,
might have done them and the State some service. The
prisoner, whose head scarcely reaches to the top of the
dock, finds some sense of personal dignity swelling his
infant breast when he hears that he has been long '
known' to that body of stalwart men to whom the care
of the Great City is intrusted.
He knows very little himself except that, for the few
years that he can remember, he has slept under arches, [-214-]
in the markets, and beneath deserted doorways; and on
rare occasions has paid twopence for a bed at a common
lodging-house, where he learned a little of his probable
future, and was taught how to matriculate for the career
upon which he has entered. We have not long done
wondering at the deeds of a band of young desperadoes
who have been infesting the neighbourhood of Kent-
street under a leader sixteen years old. The police,
active and intelligent as they are, and authorised to perform all sorts of arduous and sometimes contradictory
functions, acknowledged themselves baffled by this company of mere boy thieves, and with difficulty succeeded
in capturing their commander. What lesson could be
taught to the thousands of ignorant destitute lads who
are to be found in London streets that would be half so
potent to induce them to set the law at defiance?
They may be hunted hither and thither, moved on
from doorways, refused at workhouse gates, warned away
from tradesmen's counters, cuffed off the pavements lest
they should injure the respectability of the shoe-black
brigade-kicked hither and thither, like the worthless
things they are, until they break the law more definitely
than by mere vagabondage. Once pass the boundary
of mere petty pilfering, and they become persons of consideration, with no heavier punishment and a more ample
diet than the smaller offence would involve, and with
all the circumstances of their lives made comparatively
easy: warm lodging, tolerable food, comfortable clothes,
and even the elements of that education to which they
have hitherto had no claim, and which comes to them [-
215-]
now as a part of the premium for which they have abandoned their absurd desire to belong to the society which
never tolerates them until it can formally cast them out.
Talk of the literature of crime - of the penny numbers containing the histories of boy highwaymen and
pirates, and smuggler kings in their teens! This sort of
cheap trash is pernicious enough, no doubt, and I shall
have to refer to it in another place; but it is only hurtful where the soil has already been prepared for its reception, and it falls into utter insignificance beside the
acknowledgments of the police and the evidence of the
depredations committed by the Kent-street gang.
'
Send me to a reformatory,' said the captain of this
redoubtable band to the magistrate. But he was too
old for either of the. four Government reformatories, which
deal only with boys who are convicted of crime; and
probably there was no vacancy; since the care of the
State, even for the juvenile criminal, does not exhibit
itself in reformatories so much as in penal discipline;
and the results of penal discipline may be estimated by
the numbers of the criminal population which float in
and out of our prisons. The establishment of reformatory institutions for young offenders is perhaps a duty
of the State; but more than that is required. The blot
upon our whole present system is, that no claim can be
made on behalf of any wretched child whose home is
the streets, whose companions are many of them the
worst class of the community, until he shall have broken
the law in a manner so marked that he becomes an object of interest.
[-216-]
In some neighbourhoods of London this boy-and-girl
population, which is continually, as it were, on the borders of crime, may be constantly observed. In Club-
row on a Sunday morning; in the neighbourhood of
Spitalfields, where a labour-market is held under a railway arch, and juveniles wait in a kind of revolting statute-fair to be hired by the week to help weavers at their
work; about Friars-mount and Old Nichols-street; in
Southwark, in Westminster, and a dozen districts which
should be marked black in any missionary map of Loudon,-you may listen to their foul words and see their
crouching shuddering bodies, their wasted limbs and
old-young faces; worn with the want of food, and the
wild wistful wonder of how they are to keep on living,
or whether it would be better to die.
What can be done with these?
At present it seems that only voluntary effort can
effect anything for them, and even such effort is useless
unless it can bring itself into immediate connection with
its objects. There are thousands of these hopeless, destitute children of the State in London alone; and only
voluntary benevolent institutions deal with them on the
broad principle of free and immediate admission to a
refuge, where they may enter upon a better life - where
they may be first fed and clothed, and may rest their
poor worn little bodies and start from their broken sleep
with the unwonted shock of a kind word; and then may
learn to work and to play, and so be taken out of that
bad dream of life, and enter on a reality worth living for.
It is by institutions like the Refuges for Homeless [-217-]
Children, of which I have presently to speak, that we
may hope to mitigate some of these evils by beginning
with the children. But we want half-a-dozen ships, a
score of homes, to rescue these young vagrants from
the streets, and prevent them from growing up into
abandoned women and desperate lawless men.
KNOWN TO THE POLICE.
The relation between the juvenile criminals of London and the police is peculiar, since it would appear
that the chances of a boy-thief matriculating for a career
of crime, and ultimately taking honours in burglary or
highway robbery, depends very much upon the estimation in which he is held by those members of the force
who happen to be acquainted with his companions.
After a long and not altogether careless study of
the police-reports during some years, most people would
have a suspicion that, as adult experienced thieves are
left till they are 'wanted' - which is as much as to say
that small operations are passed over until the perpetrators are guilty of some more striking offence that
will take them to the sessions and insure a sentence of
penal servitude - so the juvenile depredator who is believed to be working with a gang, or to be under the
influence of some principal who employs him, is apparently left unnoticed until he can be convicted of direct
complicity with some important offence, or boldly goes
in for a more startling piece of business on his own
account.
[-218-]
I am now speaking, it must be remembered, of
known thieves, and not of that juvenile floating population which includes the street Arab, the itinerant match-
seller, the wretched little mudlark who begs and whines
and turns catherine-wheels in the dirt, and huddles at
night in the most painful form of human wretchedness
under the arches of the railways, in the recesses of the
bridges, or in the parks, where his half-naked body
stands a chance of being trodden on by some late passerby, who feels a thrill run through him to note a human
being wriggling on the ground, or stealthily slinking
away into the shadows of the trees.
These, of course, furnish numerous recruits to the
ranks of the young thieves who infest our thoroughfares, and the condition of their lives makes it difficult
indeed for them to hold themselves aloof from the influences that impel them to crime. Say that they are
independent in their hunger and poverty, and contrive
to beg or steal enough to find them in a meal; yet there
are plenty of opportunities for petty pilfering; and it
takes but a short time to learn the lesson, that the
greater the magnitude of the crime the better, in all respects that they deem essential, is the prison life of the
convict.
Truly the love of liberty must be the strongest passion in the human heart, or it would be difficult to understand why the enormous juvenile criminal population
of London, added to the army of wretched and starving
children which mocks our civilisation and our religious
professions, should not all claim the only birthright we [-219-]
allow them by qualifying for the ' penitentiary' and the
gaol!
It would, perhaps, be idle to complain of this state
of things, since the children that infest our streets are
many of them the property of abandoned men and women, who are only occasionally their parents, and by
their means contrive to subsist without work.
Watch at a street-corner, where half-a-dozen ragged
little shivering wretches huddle on a muddy night and
strive to sell their cigar-lights, or to beg for halfpence
in the gutter, and you shall see a weedy woman, with
a moist and watery - or rather a gin-and-pepperminty - eye not far off in the shadow of some wall or the recess of a deserted doorway. Keep a sharp look-out
where two or three bare-legged girls and hoarse urchins
fight in the roadway for the right to sweep the mud
over foot-passengers with a broom-stump, on the pretence of making a clean crossing, and you will discover
a vulpine-faced old scoundrel in shiny threadbare black,
and with an expression of evil humility, keeping watch
from the nearest tavern-door on the chance halfpence
that are scattered among these wretched little Ishmaelites, before the constable, turning that way on his beat,
scatters them, yelling and whooping, amidst the carriage-wheels. It is the constable's duty to scatter them,
for they represent an evil influence, a vile example;
they are a keen and almost unbearable reproach to our boasted enlightenment, a deadly sarcasm on our orthodoxy and high moral example to other nations of the
earth. Of course the practice of clearing away these [-220-]
offences to public propriety involves an injustice, the
weight of which is scarcely to be estimated except by
an accident which calls public attention to facts that
have some relation to the difficulty experienced by the
poor in gaining their daily bread.
In the profound and irresponsible wisdom of the highest police authority (an authority, be it observed, which
seems as little amenable to parliamentary questioning
as it is to the strongest expression of public opinion)
costermongers and itinerant vendors were not long ago
forbidden the streets. Such startling results followed,
and the revelations of the probable consequences were
so alarming, that, for once, the unquestionable sagacity
permitted a little relaxation of its edict; but the edict
itself was but an extension -a very enormous extension, perhaps - of a system that has been long pursued in the
principal thoroughfares; not only in the City, where it
is strictly applied to adult vendors of fruit, flowers, or
cheap pennyworths; but almost all over London (except
in the streets where poverty finds its market), in the
case of wretched boys and girls who are allowed neither
to buy nor sell. All honour to those noble institutions
which, amongst their earliest efforts, organised the
shoe-black brigade! I would not be supposed even to
hint a depreciation of the results, or of the mode of drilling that corps of lads rescued from misery; still, it
must have occurred to dozens of us to ask, What
chance has the poorly-clad little vagabond who contrives to start a boot-cleaning apparatus of three bits
of board and a half- worn brush or two against the [-
221-]
member of the brigade in uniform, and with an elaborate institution of blacking, and a stand all decorated
with brass-headed nails, and bad coppers impaled as a
warning to evil-doers?
What chance has any boy or girl, who, once becoming known to the police as the ' companion of thieves'-
as though they could choose their company, poor little
wretches ! -is thereafter prevented even from the pretension of earning an honest living?
Proceeding on the principle that every juvenile outsider is to be suspected of guilt until he can prove his
innocence, what chance has the miserable child? Deserted by its natural protectors; used as a medium for
obtaining an easy income by infamous cadgers, who spend
the coppers of a band of infantine beggars, in the luxury
of drink; hunted from post to pillar; driven to share
the very offal of the streets with the hungry dogs that
go about masterless; left to lie down and sleep anywhere out of the keen cutting wind, or the night rain
that soaks their rags and gives them another gnawing
pain besides that of hunger - what chance has the London Arab, ' known to the police,' except the one that
converts him into the ' well-known juvenile thief on whom
the constable has had his eye for some time past'? The
threepence that he spends some bitter night for a bed
at a ' common lodging-house' may introduce him to an
instructor, who will ' make a man of him' - such a man
as fills our convict prisons, and helps to tax us beyond
what we can bear, and scandalises our whole social system, and is at once our terror and our despair. There
[-
222-]
is an individual now in London, if he be not lately dead,
who is ready to make half-a-dozen such men out of six
boys with sharp eyes and nimble fingers. He has, or
had, a gang of them under his paternal control; and being
a benevolent old gentleman, like the late Mr. Fagin, is
known by the name of' ' Father.' It was in a common
lodging-house that I first heard of him - a common
lodging-house which the police call a 'thieves' kitchen,'
and affect to speak of as a place rather dangerous to
visit, but a place where the regulations of the lodging-
house inspectors hang on the walls, and which can only
be described as a perilous haunt on the same principle
that, according to Selden, led the old Crusaders to paint
the Saracens' heads with ferocious looks as they appeared on ancient signboards, in order
' to gain credit
to themselves.'
'
You are well acquainted with the Bible?' said I, to
a slender, shrewd, delicate-looking, closely-cropped lad
in a ragged school, who could repeat verse after verse
from the New Testament in illustration of my questions.
'
Well, yes, sir; you see, we don't have nothing much
else to read where I've been,' was his reply.
'
Isn't it a great pity, knowing so much of it as you
do, that you don't try to live as it teaches you?'
'
Well, you see, sir, that's just where it is with all
on us, ain't it?'
Is the reader surprised that I felt this retort as a
fearful rebuke, not to myself alone, but to that ' society'
of which I was but a member - the honest or ' respectable' class? I will only give the reason for my feeling
[-
223-]
as though I had received a blow from that thin, little,
supple hand. You can think of all it means, and that
will be as good as a sermon. The boy had learnt to
read in prison as a child, and had been so often com
mitted that he had the New Testament almost by-rote!
There is no need to follow such a lad as this in his
career, from the trifling theft to the regular trade of
filching, and so on to petty larceny, robbery, burglary,
or the various degrees of crime, in which he has no lack
of preceptors, in and out of prison, where he costs us
more than if we had sent him to a good public school
till he had acquired ' the usual branches of English
education.' Regarded as part of the mere question of
profit and loss in the national account, as fractions in
the sum of political economy, what an awful row of
integers do he and his like represent What when we
think of him as a living soul - one of the children of the State - of everybody's children? But there are other
boys - boys who have grown beyond mere children, and
though known to the police, have not yet been actually
registered as thieves. It is only those who know the
darkest shadows of the Great City and its suburbs who
can tell what lives some of these wretched creatures
lead. Those who know it best, and know too of what
they might be capable, are ready to weep bitter tears at
the thought, but know not how to set about the remedy.
There is so much courage and endurance, such activity
and shrewdness - call it cunning, if you like; shrewdness is often only cunning developed to higher
action -
ay, and there is often so much honesty and truthfulness, [-
224-] where you least expect to find either, that we must be
blind indeed not to see that one hope for the future of
England lies among these very outcasts, whom we are so
rapidly training to be a curse to the city that fears to
bless them, lest some should cry 'centralisation,' and
others ' secularism,' and others, again, priestcraft.'
While I am busy over these sheets, a strange discovery is made - that beneath an unfinished arch, deserted in progress of
building by a dubious railway
company, a band of boys has been discovered, whose depredations in the neighbourhood have for some time
been notorious. Singularly enough the police-officers,
who at last contrived to disperse this association of juvenile thieves, keep alive the report that their place of
concealment had been for some time suspected and
watched. We all want to know why? Was it for the
humane purpose of obtaining a longer sentence, and so
a better provision, for the wretched young criminals;
or are the active and intelligent officers unwilling to let
us think that they could be outwitted by such novices,
or to leave us to suspect that the deserted railway arch
was no part of any constable's beat?
It is only now and then that some sudden revelation
of the lives of these wild boys of London' reaches us,
even through the press a few of us know a little about
it, and are less surprised than others; but there are
hundreds of quiet, well-to-do, easy-going folks-jogging
on day by day, and marking a stage on each day's
journey by a comfortable meal-who know nothing of
this phase of the Great City in which they dwell, and [-
225-]
yet stare with horror at the account of a family in Devonshire living a sort of secluded savage life in a ruinous
cottage, and refusing either to go to church or to be
visited by the parson; returning all such civilities by
pelting anxious inquirers with dirt. Supposing some
of them happened to take up a newspaper on the 9th of
last September, I wonder what they really thought of
this:
Yesterday Dr. Lankester held an inquiry upon the
bodies of two boys, aged respectively nine and a half and
twelve, who were found suffocated in a brick-kiln in
Holloway. The first boy was named Alfred George Triggs, whose father, a respectable man living in Kensington, was called. He stated the deceased went away
on the 25th ult. from home, taking with him 1l. 16s. 6d.,
which he had stolen from a drawer, and witness heard
no more of him until he saw the body the previous day.
James Strid said he was the man in charge of the brick-
kiln where the calamity occurred, and it was in the
Hornsey-road. He then described in a light off-handed
manner the way in which the calamity was discovered,
and in doing so opened up a terrible story of life among
boys. He saw something on the kiln, and getting on a
heap of ballast he saw the something to be two boys. A
ladder was brought, and their bodies were recovered.
"How could the boys get up there?" "Why, they climbed
up there as they would climb anywhere - in at your window, over your hedges, where they would
' nick' [-steal-]
the taters, or apples, or onions, or anything else, and
roast them in the kiln. As to stopping them, it was [-
226-]
impossible; they ran like hares. The boy who had '
nicked' the money from his father (Triggs) had been
there a little time; but there were twenty altogether in
the fields, and the second boy (whose name was said to
be Joy) had been about there all the summer." "How
did they live?" "By the taters they nicked and roasted
in the kiln. They could cook anything in the kiln as
well as in an oven. The boys had not been there more
than one night, or else they would have been ' frizzled'
more." Medical testimony was then given that both
boys had been suffocated on the kiln, and their bodies
scorched by the heat. There was no food in the stomach
of either boy, but there was undigested vegetable food
in the large intestines of both. Potatoes were found in
their pockets. Some testimony was then brought to
prove the name of the second boy, whose parents were
said to have lived in Cottenham-road, Upper Holloway,
and to have gone away "hopping" a long time ago, leav
ing the boy to his own devices. The boy, it is said, took
to sweeping a crossing in Holloway, and "roosting," as
he was said to have termed it, on and about the kiln, in
the open air, at some periods of the year, and in empty
houses at other seasons. A verdict of accidental death
was returned.'
What could have given the first bad impulse to the
poor wretched child, Alfred George Triggs, aged nine
and a half, whose connection with these wild boys of Lon
don led to his death? We are not obliged to guess; but
doubtless if he could read, and we were to make inquiry,
we should be told that he had been led into evil com-[-
227-]
panionship by the influence of some of those ' penny
numbers' which are printed and sold as romances for
boys, and almost invariably have two or three criminals
for their heroes.
I may mention here, that I believe more has been
made of this as an excuse by demoralised boys themselves than will quite bear out investigation. Mr. James
Greenwood, in his Seven Curses of London, has well
indicated how sharp youthful convicts are at catching
up and taking advantage of pet theories held by governors of prisons; and I am inclined to think, that
while the evils of this criminal literature are undoubtedly
wide-spread and mischievous, they are less definite than
might be supposed from the ' confessions' of depraved
boy - thieves - confessions, alas, too often founded on
what the penitents (?) think their listeners would like
to hear.
Having said this much, I may add that the pernicious
influence of such publications in deadening the perception between right and wrong, and in making the contemplation of crime less repulsive because of its specious
veil of romance, cannot for a moment be doubted; at
the same time that the whole tone of a boy's moral nature
is debased and his imagination degraded by the vicious.
and yet absurd narratives that appear in these publications.
'
I say, Joe, ha' you read the last o' the Boy Smuggler?'
'
Yes-leastways I b'lieve so.'
'
About where he's in the cave?'
[-
228-] '
Yes, ain't that ¾fine! But ha' you read that other
¾
fine book - what d'yer call it - Red Hand, ain't it?'
'
Ah, ain't that ¾ good!'
'
I b'lieve yer; specially where he stabs the other one,
and says, "They may hang me," he says; "but I've kep' my word, an' killed the
¾ cove;" and says he,
"I'm Red Hand!" O, ain't that ¾ fine !'
This conversation I overheard not very long ago between two boys, to the edification of a third. I have no
reason to think that they were dishonest; they were
both known to me by sight, and were as usual standing
about a railway station in the chance of obtaining a bag
to carry, or a message to deliver, or any casual job that
would bring a penny or twopence; out of which it seems
even they could spare an occasional halfpenny for the
pernicious trash of which they spoke. I doubt whether
they had not already learned to swear by reading these
Devil's Primers; and certainly the frequent recurrence
of the ugly word for which I have substituted a ¾ was
directly referable to the stimulus of the unhealthy expletives put into the mouths of the fictitious personages
on whom they had learned to found their heroical style
of declamation.
It is now more than four years since I first endeavoured to draw attention to the abuse of which I am
speaking, and others have ably taken up the subject;
but the evil remains, if not undiminished, at least without immediate prospect of extinction.
These cheap serials have an advantage over the regular three-volume novel which must be a source of
[-229-]
great satisfaction both to the publisher and the reader.
They run on to any length, and frequently end with an
entirely new set of characters, long after the original dramatis personae have been disposed of by various deeds
of violence, or by the influences of broken hopes and
blighted affections.
There may be readers who complain even of three
volumes recording the workings of crime tempered with
gross stupidity; but then they have all three volumes at
once, and it is obviously quite a different thing to get a
number every Saturday, and to sit down to one's Sunday-
afternoon reading with the certainty that the hero who
was falsely imprisoned last week will be out again, and,
after confronting and braining his accuser, will jump
into a hansom, visit the woman who desires to work his
ruin, and be in time to rescue the suffering and devoted
heroine from a house on fire and the persecutions
of a drunken theatrical manager, all in the space of
an ordinary tea - time and in eight pages of largish
print.
Some of these marvellous works of fiction have been
going on for years, in nobody knows how many series,
and they have most of them the extraordinary advantage
of answering nearly as well whether you begin their
perusal at No. 1 or at No. 999; for whenever the original
hero has been disposed of by being united to the girl of
his affections - who must, according to ordinary experience, and considering the amount of ill-usage she
has undergone, present the appearance of a ragman s doll - another combination of courage and misfortune
[-
230-]
takes his place, and the inheritance of vice is never left
without some beautiful but unscrupulous criminal to
come into the property.
Where do these stories go? For what market are
the descriptions of gross immorality, the jaunty allusions to debauchery, and the common reference to some
of the worst sins with which the reader can be familiarised, made up? Of course, a large number of copies
are sold in London - sold to boys and girls who will
learn too soon what are the evils that beset them in
their real everyday life, and will certainly be none the
better for that sort of hazy paltering with crime which makes the great effect of these choice productions;
- sold
to domestic servants, who spell over the delicious dangers of a heroine, who is saved only, as it were, by an
interposing miracle from ' a gilded fate,' which, if she
hadn't loved the young man who could only offer her ' a
humble but pure and virtuous home,' wouldn't perhaps
seem so very dreadful after all - especially to one who
hadn't a young man of her own for whom she had a
very overwhelming partiality.
There can be no doubt either, that if the British
workman himself does not read such trash, the wife of
the British workman very often does. Yes, and she is
perhaps the only person of all its widely scattered subscribers to whom it does comparatively little injury;
for she reads it innocently, from the great vantage-
ground of her own practical life, her maternity, her
household duties (which may sometimes suffer a little
through the enthralling interest of a very ' cutting' [-231-]
number), and the strong sense of reality, which must
always supersede the glamour of the merely imaginative
where there are half-a-dozen children.
It can only be hoped that, when the number is done
with, she locks it safely in some upstairs drawer if any
of those children have begun to read.
But there can be no doubt that by far the largest
proportion of these publications are sent into the country; and anybody who knows the country well, will long
ago have ceased to believe in the necessary connection
between an agricultural or pastoral society and complete
innocence. Rustic simplicity is not the inevitable result of fresh butter and new-laid eggs; and while Molly
the dairymaid is skimming the milk before it 'freezes
in the pail,' what time Hodge the ploughman is so sensible of atmospheric influence that he
' blows his nail,'
they may both be engaged in a little mental plot of
their own, which may or may not have been assisted
and stimulated by their knowledge of life acquired from
the highly - spiced pages that have helped to relieve
the tedium of the long winter nights.
It is in the manufacturing and the smaller towns,
however, that these pages find their greatest admirers;
in almost any of the back streets of these places some
purveyor may be found to supply the tempting penny-
worth to lads, who some of them long to emulate
the theatrical ruffians and robbers of the narrative, or
to see for themselves, just for once (after which they
will of course return to the paths of virtue), some of
that easy vice and common debauchery so admirably [-232-]
depicted by the gay rattle who records the rather dreary
vagaries of billiard-sharpers and ' flash' thieves.
I have here put down my pen for a few minutes, for
the purpose of examining some choice examples of this #
boy's literature' which I happen to have by me, in
order to introduce some of the less revolting specimens;
but I feel that it would be better to leave them out,
even as illustrations of the subject. They are too disgusting. No reader of these lines would be likely to
take much injury from their perusal; but I have not
the excuse of their rarity to urge for inserting them.
Any quantity of such trash may be obtained a street or
two off if you care to look for it. I feel that I should
have less excuse for reprinting them than for quoting
the Newgate Calendar.
Indeed, there is a Newgate Calendar which may be
fitly referred to in this connection. It is the recent
report of the Ordinary of Newgate (Mr. Lloyd Jones),
who in his record of the gaol in 1869 says:
In my report to you last year, I stated as my experience that crime presented itself from year to year in
some new aspect, standing out like a hideous excrescence upon an unsightly surface, provoking observation and demanding serious
attention of legislators,
how to check it by the strong arm of law; and of Christian teachers, how best to proclaim the danger and to
avert the peril with which it threatens the happiness of
the unwary and inexperienced. Last year I pointed out
the mischief to the young of both sexes which I believed was caused, and I still believe is caused, by cheap
[-233-]
periodicals. I am thankful to find that my observations
met with much attention, and with the unqualified approval of several Christian men and societies, who are
endeavouring to point out and to provide wholesome
literature. The truth of this statement, which I made
last year, has just been corroborated by the chaplain of
the House of Detention, in his annual report to the
magistrates for Middlesex. Such independent and confirmatory evidence surely establishes the fact, that certain literature is inducing respectable lads to contemplate and commit crimes, and is a great and serious
evil.'
THE BEST LONDON UNION.
I have already referred to the hopeful project of
forming such an organisation for the relief of distress
as shall eventually combine in one definite and mutual
effort all the valuable agencies now employed to carry
on our Labours of Love on behalf of the poor, the suffering, and the destitute.
To learn what may be accomplished by hearty cooperation, and how surely the systematic and patient
endeavour to effect an improvement in the condition of
the neglected and ignorant of even one district will be
followed by extended means of usefulness, it is only
necessary to refer to the great Ragged-School scheme.
It is a scheme no longer, but an accomplished Institution. The effort that a quarter of a century ago was
begun as an experiment, and regarded as doubtful in its
operation, not only because of the supposed difficulties [-
234-]
in the way of voluntary support, but in consequence of
its very name, is now a mighty power in this Great
City, as well as in some of our large towns; has extended far beyond its original scope of operations; and,
could it be possible for us to hear that ragged schools
were to be at once superseded by a government system
based on an entirely different method of proceeding from
that so long successfully adopted by the Ragged-School
Union, we should most of us shudder at the probable
recoil that must inevitably occur not only in a hundred
charitable agencies, but also in the moral and mental
advancement of the classes who are in most need of the
elevating influence which this institution has so successfully maintained.
This is the very mildest way of putting it. To speak
in plain terms, there has been no other system presented
to us which could have effected any such widely extended
changes in the most depraved and miserable part of the
community; and wherever the Ragged School has been founded - and the boys and girls who are to make the men
and women of the future have been the first consideration - help, encouragement, and some means of relief to
the men and women of the present have almost simultaneously taken some definite and useful form. It is not difficult to understand. To begin with the destitute and
neglected children of the streets, difficult as the enterprise
appeared, was to set to work with a hopeful promise of
seeing an immediate result in the training of those who
were as yet susceptible of some abiding impressions,
and also of establishing actual centres of useful work, [-
235-]
where all who lived in the neighbourhood must be
sensible that a process of redemption was going on, and
so would be constrained to acknowledge that there is a
living Gospel that might reach them too.
Had the spirit of the promoters of Ragged Schools
been more zealously acknowledged - had theoretical as
well as many practical philanthropists exclaimed with
one voice, ' Let what may be left undone, this shall be
done: whatever difference of opinion we may hold
about methods of dealing with adult criminals or relieving adult paupers, this new generation of neglected
children shall, God helping us, not grow up to be a
terror to our sons and daughters, and a reproach to our
own professions' - we should not now be standing aghast
at the still unsolved problem presented by the dangerous classes.
If I need to apologise for the large proportion of
these pages occupied in considering such Labours of
Love in this Great City as are directed to the maintenance of institutions for London's lost and wandering
little ones, this is my excuse: our only hope is in a
vigorous determination to stem the tide of poverty and
crime at its source; to divert each rill as it wells up comparatively pure into a broad and noble channel, so that,
instead of lying foul and full of noxious influences in
our midst, the stream will flow forth to the healing of the
nations. Begin with the children. Of their need or of
their claim there can be no question. Whoever may have
been their parents, they are ours - everybody's children;
and we cannot put them from us if we would; they be-[-236-]
long to us: whether they shall be a source of strength
or weakness, of glory or of shame, It must be for us to
determine.
To return for a moment to a consideration with
which we started, however, it is a suggestive, and yet
an easily understood, fact, that wherever a Ragged School
has been established in a forlorn and wretched neighbourhood, its influence has extended far beyond the
scholars - nay, even beyond the circle of their own
relatives or reputed guardians. God forbid that it
could ever be otherwise! God forbid that even those
whom we regard as ' abandoned' men and women should
always be inaccessible to some emotion, to some slight
stirring of the heart, at sight of a little child; or that
men and women, however hardened and debased, should
cease to wish for that young soul a better hope than to
become as seared and deadened as themselves!
The truth is - and may we be forgiven for it! - that
we are often too ready to forget how the influences
amidst which such people live tend to seal up any expression of sympathy or tenderness; how in the very
desperation of their poverty and vice they present to us
only the worst side of their foully incrusted characters,
and defy our estimate of them at their own lowest valuation of themselves. At any rate, wherever these healthy
stirrings of the children's hearts are effected,-in the
sordid room or the recently-erected neat building, where
those little voices make the rafters ring, or raise a shout
in the alleys as they troop away from school, - something
is likely to grow out of the effort that is successful in [-
237-]
making better the condition of mothers, of sisters, of
bigger brothers, and even of such neighbours as begin
by being contemptuous, go on by becoming curious, and
often end by remaining zealous.
Thus actually in operation as distinct, but inseparable, branches of the work now carried on by the schools
in connection with the Ragged-School Union, we find
mothers' meetings, penny dinners, sewing classes, clothing clubs, coal clubs, sick clubs, blanket-loan clubs, barrow clubs, and burial clubs; blanket-lending societies,
maternity charities, penny banks, bands of hope, drum-
and-fife bands, choral classes, lending libraries, flower
shows, country excursions, and various juvenile industries, including the guilds of shoe-blacks, rag-collectors,
and street-cleaners. There is even a ' swearing club'-
which, in spite of its name, is really an anti-swearing
club, established by a lad in a district where he and
some of his companions determined to make a personal
effort to discourage the use of profane language.
To some of these I hope to call your attention presently; but it is in connection with its first great work
that I have now to speak of this Union: its work of helping in the support of free schools for the destitute poor
of London and its suburbs.
By the rules adopted on the formation of this society,
it was decided that its area of operations should be
within the metropolitan circle, the radius of which extended for twenty-four miles round
Charing-cross; and
though, of course, by far the larger number of schools
with which it is connected are in the Great City itself - [-238-]
that is to say, within the five miles' radius - there are
five more distant districts where the need for instructing
the poor and destitute has led to the formation of auxiliaries - that is to say, at Hill-street in Croydon Old Town,
at Gravesend, Brentford, Kingston, and Woolwich.
The objects contemplated by the Union are to encourage and assist those who teach in Ragged Schools; to
help such by small grants of money, where advisable; to
collect and diffuse information respecting schools now
in existence, and promote the formation of new ones;
to suggest plans for the more efficient management of
such schools and for the instruction of the children of
the poor in general; to visit the various schools occasionally, and observe their progress; to encourage
teachers' meetings and Bible-classes; and to assist the
old as well as the young in the study of the ' Word of
God.'
All teachers, and superintendents representing ragged
schools, and all subscribers of ten shillings per annum
and upwards, may become members of the Union, and
have the privilege of attending its meetings.
The financial affairs are solely conducted by the
managing committee, treasurer, and honorary secretary
(to be elected at the annual meeting of the members),
whose services are entirely gratuitous.
The Union does not interfere with the financial concerns or the internal management of particular schools,
farther than to ascertain that any money granted by the
union is applied to the purpose for which it is given;
and those schools only are in union with this society [-
239-]
where the admission is entirely gratuitous, the authorised version of the Scriptures used, and those children
alone admitted who are destitute of any other means of
instruction, while no denomination of evangelical Christians is excluded from its provisions.
The present office of the institution is at No. 1
Exeter Hall, Strand, where the secretary, Mr. J. G.
Gent, receives subscriptions. Subscriptions or donations may also be forwarded to Messrs. Hatchard & Son,
Piccadilly; Messrs. Nisbet & Co., 21 Berners-street;
to the bankers, Messrs. Barclay, Bevan, & Co., Lombard-street; or to Mr. W. A. Blake, the collector, at
the office of the union.
This association may be said to have commenced
from the foundation of the first Ragged Schools, under
the active presidency of Lord Shaftesbury, twenty-six
years ago; and whatever may be the opinion held of
his lordship in any political relation, those of us who
have watched the progress of the work which he inaugurated and has ever since strenuously and constantly
supported, can do no less than accord to him the honour of having instituted a work of greater national importance than that secured by any single effort of
statesmanship during the whole period of his long and
undiminished interest in this cause. He set the noble
example of personal effort, and with an energy and
singleness of purpose which sustained doubts, smiles,
and even sneers, set himself to work in earnest not only
to establish schools for destitute and neglected children,
but to improve the wretched dwellings and the means [-
240-]
of decent living of the inhabitants of the foul districts
to which that work was first applied.
When once the success pf the endeavour was proved,
the movement was taken up in many large towns of the
United Kingdom; and in the fifth year of their operation, the pioneers who devoted themselves to the work
had established in London 82 schools, where 8,000
scholars were taught by 900 voluntary and 120 paid
teachers.
In the tenth year the number of schools had increased to 129, the scholars to 13,000, with 1,700 voluntary and 240 paid teachers. In the fifteenth year there
were 150 schools, 22,000 scholars, 2,600 voluntary and
360 paid teachers, beside 371 paid monitors or assistant-
teachers. The twentieth year showed an increase to 163
schools, with 24,000 scholars and 2,800 voluntary teachers; the number of paid teachers remained at
360, but
the number of monitors was increased to 450.
At the present time there are 191 schools, with
32,334 scholars under the charge of 3,448 voluntary
and 424 paid teachers and 585 paid monitors.
The operations represented by the various schools
included in the union are 272 Sabbath afternoon and
evening schools, with an average attendance of above 32,000; and 194 day-schools, 40 of which are for boys,
33 for girls, and 121 for both boys and girls. In these
the number of scholars on the books are over 33,000,
and the average attendance 23,992; that is to say, 3,880
in the 40 boys' schools, 3,186 in the 33 girls' schools,
and 16,976 children in the 121 schools where boys and [-
241-]
girls are taught together. The average number of day-school children to each paid teacher is over 100, and
these teachers are assisted by monitors whenever there
are funds to render them this aid.
Then there are 209 week-night schools: 84 for boys,
where the average attendance is 3,573 ; 71 for girls, of
whom 2,935 attend; and 54 for boys and girls together,
in which the number of attendances is 3,006, making a
total of 9,514.
In 112 industrial classes - 12 for boys, and 100 for girls - 279 boys and 4,058 girls are taught some kind
of work, the preponderance of girls being of course referable to the fact that most
of these classes are for
sewing.
The London Shoe-black Societies, however, employ
an average of 377 boys, who during the year just past
earned 8,830l.
It is indeed cheering to learn, that during the year
ending March 25th, 1869, 50 scholars were placed in
the Central Shoe-black Brigade (red uniform), of whom
7 were without father or mother, 12 fatherless, and 11
motherless; 10 in the Marylebone or North-west London Shoe-black Brigade (red-and-black uniform); 6 in
the Islington or North -London Shoe -black Brigade
(brown uniform); 11 in the City of London Sewers
Street-Cleaning Brigade. Seventy-seven poor destitute
boys were thus rescued from their street life, with its evil associations and temptations, and placed in positions of honest usefulness. They were holders of horses,
crossing-sweepers, hawkers of cigar-lights, &c. Several [-
242-]
being parentless, homeless outcasts, were admitted into
the refuges attached to the brigades, and still reside
in them, doing well. The greatest portion of these
boys lodged in some of the poorest and most crowded
parts of St. Giles's parish, viz. Lincoln-court, Orange-
court, Princes-court, Wild-court, Wild-passage, all in
Great Wild-street. Also in King-street, Charles-street,
Parker-street, the Coal-yard, Short's-gardens, &c., in
Drury-lane; and Church - lane, George - street, Dudley-street, Nottingham-court, the Five and the Seven Dials,
and other places.
From one little school alone as many as 167 of the
before-mentioned class of boys have been placed in the
Central Shoe-black Brigade (red) within the past few
years.
But the employment found for lads in this brigade is
not final, nor is it the only situation open to those who are
steady and of good character. Situations are frequently
offered to such boys, and employment of a superior kind
discovered for them. The year's reports mention that
1,924 scholars have been sent from the schools to situations, while 242 have become teachers, having probably
first filled the post of monitors with credit. The payments to monitors is of course very small; but it encourages a steady boy of fair ability to study if he displays any aptitude for teaching. Day-schools, with 70
to 100 scholars in daily attendance and employing four
monitors, are empowered by the Union to pay for division among the four two shillings a-week; those with
100 to 150 children and six monitors four shillings [-
243-]
a-week; and those with 150 scholars and upwards,
and eight monitors, six shillings a-week.
Before leaving the educational work, which is of
course the principal operation of this great association,
there must be mentioned 98 ragged churches and City-
mission meetings, with an average attendance of 6,368;
68 Bible-classes, with 1,339 members in attendance;
116 teachers' prayer-meetings, with an attendance of
2,713; and 95 parents'-meetings, where 3,425 fathers
and mothers are directly under the influences to which
allusion has already been made.
To the Bands of Hope, with their 4,000 members,
and the school-libraries with over 15,000 volumes, there
is no need to do more than refer; but the 110 penny
banks number 28,685 depositors, the balance in hand
at Christmas last being 1,534l., which means, it is true,
a ridiculously small sum for each; but yet is remarkably suggestive as being the residue after the year's
fluctuating deposits had been withdrawn-deposits which
amounted to nearly 11,000l. in the twelve months, or
about eight shillings a-head; by no means an insignificant sum when we remember the extreme poverty of
the people for whom they are designed, and the lesson
these people must already be beginning to learn in the praetice of a difficult economy.
One of the most illustrative of the institutions for
the benefit of adults which has grown out of Ragged
Schools is the barrow club, to which I have already
alluded. In one district - a very representative neighbourhood called
Perkins's-rents - as many as forty-three [-
244-] barrows have been built, and then supplied to members
who have paid a shilling a-week for fifty-five weeks. It
will be readily understood how hopeless a task it must
seem for a poor costermonger or a street hawker ' down
on his luck' ever to accumulate the money for purchasing
a real handy barrow of his own, without some help; and
where can he obtain a loan of nearly three pounds for
such an investment without incurring obligations which
will make barrow and stock and his very personal liberty
the property of the lender till it is repaid? Could he
only put by a shilling a-week! But he can't. There's
nowhere to put the money but where he can't make up
his mind to take such a small sum as a shilling, and
so, ' going to the public to think it over, with a pint of
beer,' shilling and resolution are alike dissipated. But
here is a way open to get a regular first-rate barrow,
built on the latest scientific principles, and with all
sorts of improvements ready to his hand, if he can but
get along for a year or so with hiring. One can well
imagine the joyful satisfaction of the member of the barrow club as he goes out in the morning trundling
that representative vehicle before him, and thinks perhaps of having his name painted on it with an appropriate motto.
That the barrow club exercises a real moral influence need scarcely be insisted on; but as an
illustration, I will here, reprint an anecdote told by its promoters, who thus
record an incident in its history:
'
It is very remarkable, considering the wandering
life of some of the barrow-holders, that none have ever [-
245-]
been lost to the society, and it reflects great credit on
the management. We were much amused at the history of a narrow escape some two years since. It was
about half-past ten one cold snowy night that tidings
reached the club that a holder of a grinder's barrow,
who resided in the neighbourhood, had been sent home
helplessly intoxicated in a cab, and minus his barrow,
and that he had been last seen in company with a man
of very bad repute, who purposed leaving London early
the next morning. The secretary of the society, accompanied by two volunteers, members of the barrow club,
determined to start off at once to save the barrow, if
possible. Being well acquainted with the various haunts
of the suspected person, they visited numerous places
without getting any tidings of the barrow. At length
they reached Hammersmith, and entering a court they
came upon the barrow standing in the yard. Knocking
up the man whom they suspected of having carried it
off, but who protested that he had found it standing
without an owner, and had placed it there for safety,
the secretary claimed it as the property of the society;
and as a policeman was standing by no opposition was
offered, and the barrow was wheeled away in triumph,
the persevering pedestrians not reaching Westminster
till nearly two in the morning, wet and weary enough.
The satisfaction of having done their duty, however,
was their only reward, as they received no gratuity
whatever, and the occurrence was only casually mentioned some time afterwards.'
If the barrow club may be taken as a good illus-[-
246-]
tration of the external work in connection with ragged
schools, Perkins's-rents, where the largest of these
branch societies is held, may be regarded as a neighbourhood well representing the places where the schools
themselves have been established, and the glorious
work that they are accomplishing.
To say that Perkins's-rents is situated in one of the
lowest parts of Westminster is to say no more than that
it was once, if it be not now, amongst those ' worst parts
of London' that have become proverbial for ignorance,
vice, and misery. After having spoken of Spitalfields
and Bethnal-green, and threaded the mazes of Southwark, and been lost in the tangled webs that
characterise some other wretched localities to be spoken of
presently, Westminster still presents to the wayfarer in
the slums of the Great City its own specially terrible characteristics - its own long - disregarded warrens of
crime, and long-undisturbed burrows of poverty and
wretchedness. Why it should so long have been known
as the ' Devil's Acre' it is not difficult to imagine; how
it should have been so long left in possession of such
satanic tenancy is matter for humble repentance and
hopeful, prayerful determination with regard to other
places where less has been done to issue a writ of ejectment. In this traditional haunt of the wretched and
the vicious, the One Tun was the favoured tavern to
which thieves and ruffians resorted; and it was in that
very One Tun - long ago converted into a ragged-school
building, but retaining the name of its old sign - that
the labour of love was commenced. Never was there [-
247-]
any traditional tun - no, not even that of Heidelberg -
which contained so much. The children who were first
gathered within its sheltering walls have grown into
men and women, and the work has increased too; so
that with the new generation there has flowed out upon
the neighbourhood the very wine of life. Day and
evening schools, Sunday schools, Mothers' Meeting,
Band of Hope, Blind Bible Reader, Penny Bank, Lending Library, a Clothing Fund, a Sick and Destitute
Fund, and the Fathers' Home (known as the Westminster Working Men's Club and Beading Rooms, Old
Pye-street, late Duck-lane), with its separate efforts of
Bible and Educational Classes and Prayer Meetings,
Penny Bank, Loan Society, Barrow Club, Temperance
and Sick Societies, and Lending Library - all have had
their rise here; and associated with it, if not a part of
its unfailing effort, the dwelling - house for sixty - one
families, Westminster-buildings, Old Pye-street. The
annual sum for which these are carried on is 231l. 5s. 4d.;
203l. 7s. 11d, being required - and more being needed,
now that the work is growing larger still - for the schools
only.
This chain of institutions at the One Tun is, however, but an example of various efforts in the most
benighted corners of the Great City; some of them in
districts with which we are all familiar, others in neighbourhoods through which few of us pass, and the very
existence of which is almost unsuspected by hundreds
of people who yet have spent their lives in London.
For instance, how many of the readers of these lines [-248-]
have been up and down the zigzag courts, and in and
out among the foul maze that is fitly named after
CHEQUER-ALLEY.
You know Chiswell-street. So do I. You know
Aldersgate-street, and Whitecross-street (the outside of
the prison, I mean), and Barbican, and Bunhill-row,
with its celebrated burial-ground recently restored from
wreck and ruin to comparative order. So do I. You
may even go so far as to say that you know Golden-
lane; but unless you are a robust and practised observer, your knowledge of that desperate byway is of a
very superficial character. For Golden-lane is in vice
and squalid poverty scarcely to be equalled in London.
There are few places where, in so short a walk, so many
evil-looking taverns find customers all day long; few
localities where on Sunday mornings the opening of the
public-house doors is looked forward to with such dogged
expectation by the ' roughs' who lounge about the
causeway, or sit on the kerb-stone or the door-steps,
that they may be ready to take advantage of the first
withdrawal of the bolts of those doors that are ' on the
swing' for eighteen hours out of twenty-four on every
day but Sunday. Women with children in their arms,
or draggling after them in the mud-women loud-voiced,
wild-eyed, evil-tongued-are to be seen at any hour in the day at the foul sloppy bars of these places-more
women than men during the mornings and afternoons
of week-days. At night the inmates of those dim rooms,
into some of which you may just peep as you pass, add [-
249-] their custom to the demand for drugged drink and rank
tobacco. Those rooms belong to the lodging-houses
where the ' tramps' kitchens' are to be found - places
far less safe for an amateur to visit than the so-called '
thieves' kitchens,' about which the police sometimes
pretend to have so much difficulty.
However, supposing even that you have a passing
acquaintance with Golden - lane, have you penetrated
farther still in your explorations, and been in and out,
here and there, among the Chequers? In a word, do
you know Chequer-alley?
Don't pretend that you have an acquaintance with
it because you have seen the name painted up over a
narrow, squalid, forbidding entry to a dark court, and
have concluded that it was a mere foul cul de sac, or a
neglected byway to some adjacent street. If that has
been your conclusion, you were never more mistaken in
your life. Chequer-alley means a whole zigzag neighbourhood, an agglomeration of alleys and courts, intersecting as wretched and poverty-stricken a district as
can be found in all London-a puzzle-map of poverty,
a maze of misery, in which the unaccustomed visitor
might grow heart-sick and dizzy in the effort to find
his way amidst the tangle of hovels and close yards; of
which a key is not to be found in any map that I know
of; the names of which are probably unsettled by any board of works, local or
metropolitan; a vast sty in
the midst of this Great City where 20,000 human beings
herd together in a condition so wretched, that had a
traveller to some distant land sent back a description [-250-]
of a native colony disclosing such destitution, vice, and
ignorance, we should at once have asked why no missionaries had been despatched to remedy a state of things
more repulsive than many narratives of heathen life
which have claimed and found immediate response from
Christian effort.
I think I have some acquaintance with what are
called the worst neighbourhoods of London. I have
made many a journey down East; have studied some
of the strange varieties of life on the shore amidst
that waterside population that edges the brink of the
Thames; have lived amidst the slums of Spitalfields,
and passed nights Whitechapel-way; but never, in any
single unbroken area of such extent, have I seen so
much suggestive of utter poverty, so much privation
of the ordinary means of health and decency, as in a
journey up and down the Chequers. About Bethnal-green, as I lately tried to show, there are foul spots
lying hidden behind sordid streets, and on the back
yards of houses on which hovels have been built; but
here is an entire district all hovels and yards - small
dirty spaces, where water-tap and drain, in close proximity and conveniently near the front doors,
serve for a
score of families; each court or blind alley with the
same characteristics, the same look of utter poverty,
the same want of air and light, the same blank aspect
of dingy wall and sunken door-step, the same effort to
make common use of the only space there is by stretching lines from window to window on which to dry the
few poor articles of clothing which have been washed - [-251-]
goodness knows where - and are unstirred by any breeze
that blows, shut in, as they are, in close caverns, only
to be entered by narrow passages between blank walls.
It is the extent of this area of poverty, almost in the
very centre of City life, that is so bewildering; and
therein lies its terrible distinction.
Any one unaccustomed to such places feels a kind
of fear steal over him as he threads the windings of the
place, and amidst the depressing stillness that is peculiar to such
neighbourhoods when no shrill brawl or
drunken clamour breaks the usual silence, wonders if it
would be safe to wander there at night; whether some
contagion of disease may not make it unsafe to breathe
the tainted air by day; some sudden caprice of ruffianism await his faltering footsteps as he lingers in a
narrow inlet, where there is scarcely room for one to
pass.
There was a time when this latter fear would not
have been groundless; a time when crime as well as
vice and ignorance ran riot, and the ferocity as well as
the heathenism of such savage life was made the more
dangerous by its casual contact with civilisation: but
that time has passed away. To an observant eye there
are many efforts after cleanliness and order, which are
amongst the most pathetic evidences that a work is
in progress there. Just as the unbroken extent of the
miserable neighbourhood is its evil distinction from the
worst parts of Bethnal-green, so this is its more hopeful characteristic.
Yet how is it that the effort should not be made to [-252-]
meet the wide need of such a benighted spot? Who
can avoid asking whether it would not be a noble and
useful achievement to attack this one stronghold of
Satan, and to let in air and light to those imprisoned
souls? Slow as the processes may be by which such
results are completely attained, would it not be well if
we could at least provide for their thorough accomplishment? Alas, it rests with us, with you, with all who
themselves profess to walk in the truth, to give the
necessary aid. The labour is begun, but the labourers
are few; the field full of promise, but the work deferred
for need of reapers in the harvest.
What has been done by the ' authorities' may be
summed up in a short paragraph.
It is about thirty years since the first organised
voluntary effort was made to improve the moral condition of the neighbourhood. It was in April last year
that the sanitary surveyor reported on one of the courts
of this foul district, recommending that the premises
therein should be demolished under the ' Artisans and
Labourers' Dwelling Act.' That report states distinctly
enough that the floors and ceilings are considerably out
of level, some of the walls saturated with filth and water,
the others broken and falling down, doors, window-sashes,
and frames rotten, stairs dilapidated and dangerous, roof
leaky and admitting the rain, no provisions for decency,
and foul and failing water-supply. This is a picture of
a locality where the only model lodging-house built for
the inhabitants stands unoccupied, except by a mission
and ragged school, since, like all the model lodging-[-
253-]
houses, the provision was not adapted to meet the
needs of the poorest; a locality where whole families
occupy single rooms at a rental varying from 1s. 6d. to
5s. weekly.
Nearly twenty-nine years have passed since the first
regular effort was made to throw light upon this dark
corner of the Great City; and that effort, as far as any
direct system is concerned, was due to an active and
zealous woman, who still lives to see the work that
she inaugurated yielding hopeful wages. It was in
1841 that Miss Macarthy, with an earnest desire to
join in some work of charity and mercy, applied to the
secretary of the Tract Society connected with the Wesleyan Chapel in the City-road to become a
'distributor;'
and the neighbourhood she chose was this same foul
tangle of courts and alleys to which I have asked you to
accompany me. She was supported by Mr. Richard Josland - a gentleman whose quiet unostentatious benevolence was long exercised in and around this plague-spot
of London, both by personal effort and missionary exertion, maintained at his own expense. Bad as the whole
district is now, it was far worse then. It was never
decidedly a thief quarter; but many juvenile thieves
haunted it, as they do now; and the men and women
were as debased and brutal as could be found in all London. Instead of being paved, and partially, if insufficiently, drained, it was an agglomeration of filthiness, with
here and there a fetid pool where ducks swam, and the
stench of open cesspools added to the foul odours of the
miserable houses. No policeman dare venture there alone.
[-
254-]
It is not difficult to imagine what sort of reception
the tract-distributor encountered; too easy to conclude
how hopeless it seemed to fix the attention of the
wretched dwellers in this great foul sty, even when an
epidemic of typhus, known as the ' courts' or ' poverty' fever, was raging, and Miss Macarthy herself was smitten down in the midst of her work, just as she had
begun to make her patient kindness felt.
The interruptions of those religious services that
were commenced in a ratcatcher's front parlour - the
joining in the hymns with scraps and overwhelming
choruses of songs; the personal assaults, and premeditated insults to which those were subject who joined in
the work-have been told in a little book, entitled Chequer Alley, published four years ago; a book which any one
who desires a genuine relief from 'sensation' articles,
and can still estimate a plain statement and a truthful
description, should read for himself.
To-day as we thread these dirty mazes, and note
the people standing at their doors, we are aware of a
change brought about by a living influence; especially
as we look at the groups of children here and there,
with something of quiet purpose and childlike pleading
confidence in their little faces, we feel that some great
work is really going on.
Well, Miss Macarthy is still busy there-busy with
the school that she founded, busy with children's dinners, with class-meetings, week-night services, agencies
for relieving want, as well as for instructing the ignorant in the way of life-and since she laid that first foun-[-255-]dation, others have taken up the work; distinct, but not
separate, in their endeavours.
For instance: standing here at the very beginning
of the alley itself, we can hear a buzz and murmur of
children's voices; and on inquiring of a juvenile native,
who is evidently striving to interpret our intentions,
learn that, it is ' our school; and you kin go in, sir; anybody can.' ' Hope
Schools, for All,' is the name of the
place; and a good name too, if we are to judge by what
is to be seen at this moment: for to begin with -
and a blessed beginning it is - here are fifty or sixty '
infants;' many of them such bright, rosy, chubby little
creatures, that we wonder how it is possible for so much
beauty to bud in this neglected corner of the Great City.
Some, on the other hand, are pale, and with that wistful, under-fed look that goes to the heart; but there
are few of them who have not got clean faces, and who
do not show in their poor and often scanty little dresses
some attempt at decent preparation for meeting ' the guv'ness.'
She has hard work, poor lady-hard and sometimes
almost overwhelming work, she and her assistant-teacher;
far beside these little ones some 150 of the elder scholars
are just now in their classes, and as the afternoon school
is nearly over for the day, there is some difficulty in
keeping silence. No difficulty in gaining a ready but
shy answer from any one of the pupils, however; no difficulty either in obtaining a youthful guide, who, being
a resident in the outlying precincts of Fore-street, volunteers to conduct us through the Chequers without
[-256-]
stipulated reward. You may have noticed as you came
in, that three girls were busy scrubbing the gallery of
an outer room, generally used for the infant-school, but
now in process of cleansing; you may have observed a
kind of covered yard too, where there is a huge copper
and some cooking apparatus. This copper has just
been doing good service, for besides furnishing eighty
to a hundred penny dinners' a-week, it has yielded I
know not how many gallons of gratuitous soup. Then
on Christmas-day! What a Christmas! Fancy 600
little hungry mouths ready to be filled with juicy cuts
from prime roast legs of mutton, followed with such a
pudding as leaves its unctuous steam in nooks and
crannies of the place for a whole month afterwards!
This Hope-for-All room is scarcely ever empty; its
echoes are heard from early morn till night, for there
are evening schools where forty or fifty older pupils are
taught reading, writing, and arithmetic; there are,
also, an adult class, a Sunday-evening service, and a
week-night prayer-meeting; and beyond that, again, a
mothers' meeting, where about fifty poor women assemble once a-week, and from their small savings buy
materials, furnished them at wholesale cost price, to
make clothing for themselves and their children.
The visiting ' Bible-woman' is agent not only to
bring the parents and the children to this Home of
Hope, but to report such cases of distress as may be
relieved when there are funds for that purpose. During
the winter evenings the light and attractive element of
refining amusements is added to these widely-reaching [-
257-]
influences, - lectures, readings, dissolving-views, concerts; and in the summer, strangest perhaps of all in
Chequer-alley, a flower-show, and an excursion into
the country.
But our youthful guide is waiting for us at the door,
while we have barely exhausted even the mere list of
what is being done in this one spot. We go out into
the dim courts, and thread their labyrinths with lighter
hearts, and yet-and yet-how much remains to do?
The candle placed on a candlestick lights that house
and all belonging to it-nay, its rays penetrate to
scores of these sordid homes where else all would be so
dark and drear; but what a depth of gloom still lies
beyond! If we could only climb up to some eminence
where we could look down on all that dreadful neighbourhood-take a bird's-eye view of the
Chequers, and
see it like a map below - then we might come to estimate more nearly what is waiting to be done; how
much strength and energy and charity is yet required
to carry on the work, even though it should not be increased. Nay, if one could only stand in the midst of
tills dreadful place, and in a voice of thunder proclaim
to the Great City its duty and its shame, and so bring
swift aid by firing men's hearts and consciences!
Softly! the work is not done that way-not in the
accents of thunder, but in the still small voice - not by
denunciation and threatening, but by man speaking to
his fellow even as Christ spake, is the work to be accomplished. But look here!
We are standing before a great blank brick building, [-258-] with a solid look, as of an edifice meant to last, and yet
with a shut-up and, if I may say so, slip-shod appearance, as of one that has not fulfilled its purpose. Reading what is written on a painted board, you will see that
it is the head-quarters of the ' Costermongers' Mission;'
but come with me. Now you know what this great pile
was intended for. You recognise the long barrack-like
passages, the square blank rooms right and left, the
corridors, the steep stairs, the look of fire-proofness, the
rather repellent air of the whole place, and see in all of
them the features of one of those model lodging-houses
which never yet have met the wants of the poorest - no,
nor often even of the poorer-class of labourers. No wonder that this is empty in a neighbourhood of costermongers, casual labourers, workers at poor and fluctuating trades, street-hawkers, and the worst-paid rank
of artisans.
Up, and still up, till you wonder where we are to
stop, and then suddenly here you are on the flat roof,
far above all that maze of squalid houses, and trying to
gaze down through its pall of smoke and London fog,
to trace the ramifications of the foul web. It is an
awful sight-a sight to arouse sad and serious reflections; to awaken thoughts that should not leave us
soon, and should bear fruit in action. By your side
stands the master of the ragged school, which counts
185 scholars, and is held in the large rooms on the first
floor. Suddenly, from an open window in one of the
nearest of the houses, we see a group of faces, the sudden brightening of which is visible even from this height,
[-259-]
and presently a shrill chorus of 'Hullo, Mr. Harwood!
hullo, sir! We can see you, Mister Har-wood!' rings
up above the streets.
It is one of the pleasantest things we have yet
heard; and yet, when we go down into the school we
shall hear something pleasanter still. As we stand talking in the boys' schoolroom, the door suddenly bursts
open, and a group of little creatures from the girls' and
infant school adjoining almost tumble over the threshold with noisy shouts of ' Good-bye!'
'
Run away, you rogues,' says our quiet acquaintance,
breaking into a ready smile nevertheless.
Such a peal of laughter as greets his threatening
gesture it does one's heart good to hear; and when to
that is added a shrill appeal of ' Kiss me, please, Mr.
Harwood!' many a tougher subject than you or me
might give way a little.
This same quiet gentleman, with the determined
face, is he who undertakes one of the most difficult
parts of the mission work. He goes as a preacher and
missionary to the ' tramps' kitchens.' The work among
the costermongers is rough and liable to all sorts of
boisterous interruptions, but it is plain sailing compared to nightly visits to those dens, the common
lodging-houses of Golden-lane and its neighbourhood.
But we have only time to speak a word to the female
missionary, whose arduous duty is now so appreciated
by the poor, the sick, and the suffering, to whom she
is the harbinger of hope and sympathy; no time at all
to hear of the children's Sunday-evening service, the [-260-]
open-air preaching, the sewing classes, the ragged-boys'
patching class, the maternity charity, the clothing club,
the drum-and-fife band, the choral classes, the penny
savings-bank, and barrow fund, the shoe club, the aid
to the destitute in the purchase of tools, the supply of
food, or in advances for buying a baked-potato can, a
sweep's broom, or a hawker's basket, with a shilling or
two to stock them. We have only just time to hear
that the penny dinners and the children's dinners (with
the aid of that most admirable institution, the Destitute
Children's Dinner Society) have gone on merrily, but
are now, alas, in sore need of help, as indeed the whole
work is - help in money as well as in sympathy and
personal interest. Still, here too they had their Christmas-day, and a jolly one it was; for a party of 320 men,
women, and children were invited to a good dinner, tea,
&c. (I like that ' &c.') in the Mission Hall.
In issuing the invitations, care was taken to select
the most deserving cases. One poor man went into a
neighbour's shop to buy two 'fagots' - a mystical savoury
meal made of the # inwards' of a pig - with his last two-
pence, for his family's dinner on Christmas-day. He
was known to be a deserving man, a painter out of
work; so the shopkeeper gave him tickets for the dinner.
When he entered the building, he saw the banner, '
Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.' With his eyes full
of tears, he turned to his wife and said, ' Ay, Polly, an'
that's true, if it never wor before.' At tea-time the party
was augmented by seventy of the fusee-boys who throng'
round the Post-office, Exchange, and Mansion House.
[-261-]
After tea there was singing, with some religious addresses, and a dissolving-view lecture on the life of Jesus.
With this information (but stay - don't look whether it
is a sovereign or a shilling that you have released from
your purse) we take our departure; and at the very door,
where we rejoin our young cicerone, hear that ' last night three hundred costers, with their wives, were entertained
at tea.'
To return for a moment to those Hope Schools where
we were furnished with our young guide - now on his
blithe way homeward with a shilling and a couple of
rashers, which I fervently hope will be an agreeable
addition to the tea of his only surviving parent, a poor
woman who ' goes out to wash when she can get it to do' - to return to the ' Hope Schools for All,' well worthy
of their name. They began with a Sunday-school, which
was opened in Blue Anchor-alley forty-eight years ago,
and which remained there till 1850, when the present
ground, belonging to the Society of Friends, but for
some reason not used by that body, was granted for
the present building, - funds for which were mainly
collected and contributed by Mr. Greig of the City-road,
who first used it for a British day and Sunday-school,
and then let it at a nominal rent to the committee of
the Hope Schools, until his death about four years ago,
when they obtained it in their own name.
It would be difficult indeed to estimate the work that
is being accomplished by its various agencies, not only
in the instruction and moral improvement of the people
around it, but in the direct alleviation of their distress; [-
262-] but the income is still so small that the labourers here
are frequently half disheartened: and the treasurer, Mr.
Robert Young, of 125 Wood-street, Cheapside, begs that
something may be added to the 245l., which was all that they could collect for the efforts of the last official year.
Personal help is earnestly sought also; help in the
schools and the mission work, both of which are in full
operation, but depend solely on voluntary aid.
This admirable effort is perhaps less specific and,
I may add, without depreciating either, less demonstrative in its character than the Costermongers' Mission and some of the agencies connected with that
institution. It has the quiet definite work before it
that has come to it in long years of experience; its
report is short, simple, and remarkable for its almost
Quaker-like simplicity of language and absence of startling appeal or allusion. Very little is said in it about
the peculiar phase of wretchedness presented by the
neighbourhood. A very clear summary of what is being
done in the different sections of the mission concludes
only with the following calm and pious reference:
'
To-night, therefore, we present what is substantially the forty-seventh annual report of the schools;
and in doing so, we would record our deep gratitude to
Almighty God for having raised up a succession of
labourers, through so long a period, to hold forth the
word of life in this necessitous district.'
Even in the necessary reference to the sort of cases
where the visits of the Bible-woman have led to relief
being afforded, the facts are stated with remarkable ab-[-263-]
sence of comment. They need none; for what terrible
disclosures are included in their bare recital!
'
M. H., left friendless and helpless, her father dead,
her mother in the infirmary.
'
T. B. is unable to accept a long-wished-for situation, from want of clothing.
'
J. H. is carried off to one hospital, to have his foot
amputated; in the mean time his wife, sickening with
typhus, is carried off to another.
'
J. N., at work as usual at home, suddenly drops
down senseless; the mother and daughter, both in bed
with typhus, unfit to help even themselves, with the
aid of another daughter, just recovered from fever, although unitedly unable to undress the dying man, contrive to raise him into bed, where, after lingering a few
days, he dies.
'
J. D. is away in the infirmary, her boy in the
Fever Hospital; her husband, with little work, has to
tend the remaining three, who, one after the other,
sicken on his hands with typhus fever.
'
Such instances are the frequent experience of any
one visiting in a locality like this; and they are now
given in hope that the recital, meagre though it be, may
touch the springs of liberality, in those able to place at
the disposal of visitors the means of alleviating, in some
degree, the misery that surrounds us.
'
It may not be out of place here to mention the good
that has been done with the parcels of old clothing, so
kindly placed at our disposal by many friends of the
mission. Two hundred articles have been given away [-264-]
during the year, and many a poor half-naked child has
been comfortably clothed. At the end of this report,
we record our thanks to those friends who have, by their
seasonable gifts, so largely helped us; and we would
earnestly beg the kind remembrance of other friends,
that we may be enabled to extend a mode of relief so
beneficial.'
I am, I think, better pleased with this almost reticent
report than with many others that I have seen; there is
something consistent in its calm deliberation with the
long experience that it has had amidst the district where
it hopes on, and, what is better, works on still. And
indeed it has reason to hope as well as to work. With
its Sunday-school, where 80 scholars go in the morning,
292 in the afternoon, and 350 in the evening for instruction; with its Bible-classes; its ragged day-schools;
its adult class, for teaching men and women to read
and write; its girls' sewing classes; its parents' library
of 160 volumes, where for a penny a-month subscribers
have the use of the books, beside a gratuitous copy of
the British Workman; and not the least of all its cheerful observances, its soup-kitchen, children's dinners,
and parents' tea-meetings, at the last of which about
400 poor people met in social enjoyment,-it represents
a movement to which I heartily wish I could add an
impetus that would spread its benign influence not only
over Chequer-alley, but to all the wretched and neglected
places which are the dark corners of this Great City.
Not less useful, however, and, as far as I can judge,
not less necessary, is the energy that is devoted to the [-265-]
neighbouring agencies of the Costermongers' Mission.
There seems to be a certain lively ' go' and, if I may say
so without any disparaging intention, self-assertion about
this institution, whose report is entitled 'After Office
Hours,' which is someway illustrative of the coster himself. He is generally a lively bird, with a good deal
of 'slackjaw' and a plucky disregard of obstacles in the
way of doing as well as he can, that makes him a distinct part of the London population. I
fancy - still
under apologetic protest - that there is in some sense
a similar distinction about this mission in Hartshorn-court, Golden-lane. He and it are alike in best characteristics; and I am fortunate in being able to take two
separate Ragged School and mission establishments,
within a stone's throw of each other, and yet serving
to illustrate two varieties of the work necessary to
carry on the Labours of Love in the worst parts of
London.
The success of this effort, as far as its inauguration
and continued superintendence are concerned, is due
to one gentleman, Mr. W. J. Orsman, who seems to
have devoted all his leisure to the work, and has found
earnest coadjutors, who, like himself, have contrived
to make the comparatively small amount contributed
go a long way in aiding the poor creatures to whom
they sought to carry consolation. The general expenses
are about 200l.; the salary of the Bible-woman, who
is their district-visitor, 32l. ; but these cannot include
the children's dinners, the help for the sick and for
lying-in women, the aid to the destitute and the starv-[-266-]ing, or the means of distributing comforts and secondhand garments to the naked. Mr. Orsman appeals
urgently for help of any kind, either in money (which
is best) or in cast-off clothes, books, women's garments,
flannel, or any commodity available to feed, cover, employ, or teach the poor.
'
Our mission,' he says in his report, ' specially aims
to benefit the neglected costermongers, a class not easily
accessible. They are rarely at home. To obtain the
day's vegetables, the coster must necessarily rise very
early. He is at the market in time to unload the wagons for the market trade to good houses; and for this
he will receive a shilling. He waits for the clearings
of the markets, which he obtains at prices varying from
3s. to 20s. for a truck-load. He may dispose of them
all by dinner-time at a good profit; but often he pushes
his load, varying from 1 to 2 cwt., nearly all day before
he obtains a dozen customers. In such cases he will
take his stand in Whitecross-street, and sell the remainder of his stock to very poor people at the lowest
possible profit. At night he is found in the beer-shop,
theatre, or the penny gaff. His home is therefore neglected; and as that home consists entirely of one room,
he has none of those sacred associations which cluster
around our English firesides.'
Considering that out of some 20,000 inhabitants of
that festering locality, within a furlong of the place
whence we have looked down upon it, 30 per cent are
costermongers or itinerant street-traders, there is work
for those who will help in this Labour of Love; and [-267-]
when the costers are well attended to, there is another
30 per cent of casual labourers almost in the condition
of paupers; 20 per cent of labourers, charwomen, needlewomen, &c.; and 20 per cent of such as follow the occupations of artificial flower-makers, brace and shoe sewers,
toy-makers, wood - choppers, crossing - sweepers, bone-
pickers, &c.
It is the costers who have given a name to the institution, however, and both they and the very children
in the ragged school seem to exhibit that peculiar wide-awake-ativeness which is their characteristic, as
well as that tendency to ' jaw,' to which I have already
referred.
'
What is a prophet?' asked the teacher, addressing
one of the pupils in his class.
'
Why, it's wot yer gets over when yer sells any-
think,' was the reply.
To the question ' Why did Jairus rejoice when his
daughter was raised from the dead?' another little fellow ventured to surmise, ' Cos it didn't cost him nothink
for the funeral.'
It is not very surprising to learn that these children
are frequently away helping their parents. Indeed a
good 'barker' - that is, a good boy to halloo - on one
side of a street, while the hawker carries his wares on
the other, is a great acquisition to a coster; and
one little fellow here, a diminutive lad little more than
eight years old, takes out and, places his mother's
vegetable stall in Whitecross-street daily before he goes
to school. Some costermongers do not send their chil-[-268-]
dren to school until the morning trade is over, while
others after school-hours are vending fusees and evening-papers in the streets. For this purpose a few pupils are allowed to leave earlier in the afternoon.
The children make rapid progress in their elementary lessons; no pains being spared to instruct them in
reading, writing, and arithmetic; but it is literally a
ragged school. Many of the children are shoeless, stockingless, and shirtless; and such is the force of
habit, that even when they become possessed of a pair
of boots they ask the teacher to be allowed the favour
of sitting in the school without them.
Those who would really know what is the distress
of this foul quarter should go with the missionary, or
with one of the eighteen voluntary helpers who carry
on the house-to-house visitation in connection with this
mission. Now, indeed, as they will tell you, metropolitan
improvements and railway monopolies have demolished
so many small houses in other poor districts, that
the courts and alleys are more crowded than ever
with human beings. In the plain reports of that condition, of which they are the witnesses, we hear of a
family of five persons, four dogs and a cat, who live
and sleep in a small room; of an old woman with eight
cats; and close by of a room where a family of seven live
and sleep together, besides cooking and selling fried fish
in the same apartment during the day. Another room
is occupied by a jobbing tailor, his wife, and nine children; in another, a cobbler, with eight in
family; and
in two other small rooms, having only one outer door, [-
269-]
are three men, four women, and four children, who carry
on their trades, and live and sleep together. A widow,
with four children of the respective ages of 13, 11, 8,
and 5 years, and a married daughter and her husband
lived in a back room ten feet square, and for which
they paid 2s. 9d. weekly. When visited all were ill with
the fever. The mother and child died shortly afterwards. The room was filthy and desolate it contained
only a broken table, four chairs tied up with pieces of
string, and a broken looking-glass. The bodies of the
dead were like the room, and the visitors had even to
supply coverings to bury them in.
Whatever may be the effect of any national system
of education on existing methods of instructing the
children of the poor, it is scarcely likely that Ragged
Schools will be abolished. Their name may be changed,
and some of the details with which the present working
is connected may undergo alteration; but the success
with which they have been attended, and their widely-
spread influence as centres of relief and instruction to
adults as well as to infants, to parents as well as children, seem to insure their recognition in any scheme
that may be adopted. At all events, they have, to a
great extent, proved that poor parents are not altogether
unwilling to send their children to any school where a
genuine interest is displayed in their welfare, and the
unsectarian teaching of religion from the words of the
Bible alone has been no insurmountable obstacle even
to many poor Roman Catholics whose boys and girls
attend the classes.
[-270-]
In any scheme, however comprehensive, and even
should it involve the substitution of some other method
than that now adopted by this voluntary agency in dealing with the very poorest class of children, whose parents will be held responsible for giving them the means
of instruction, there must be some provision for a class
still more destitute-a class to which the first ragged
schools carried some hope of relief, and to which the
developments of other agencies, of which these schools
were the occasion, has afforded a great measure of permanent help and the means of redemption from a life
of vice and misery.
When we have so completed our system of national
education as to have garnered the very last child into
a well-ordered school, with the grateful consent of its
proper and legal guardians, what arc we to do with the
neglected and deserted little ones of this Great City, who
either have no parents or have been sent adrift till they
have lost the knowledge of parental care, and can establish no claim?
The only legal guardianship now existing for them
is, as I have tried to show, never really exerted by the
State on their behalf until they have qualified themselves by crime for legal
cognisance, or have gone to
the door of some casual ward to whine for a night's
shelter, and the uncertain reception of officials, of
whom they have a natural dread; to be followed, at the
best, by admission to a pauper life, the daily circumstances of which they have heard, and are warranted
in believing, are often as penally oppressive as, and more [-271-]
destructive of every childish hope than, the punishment
inflicted by actual imprisonment for crime.
It is to children more or less in this deplorable condition that Ragged Schools have proved a boon; and
should the State ever set itself to work to make the
future of England, by beginning at the very spring of
national life, and constituting itself the guardian, guide,
and parent of these deserted little ones, it will already
find some eminent examples of the way in which the
work, is to be accomplished.
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