Pg. 598

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 598 HOUSEHOLD WORDS. [Conducted by

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 maker. There are helmets, by Foxglove, for the same community. There are also the well known little yellow “shoes and stockings.” There is veronica, there are the pink blossoms of the wild geranium and the red lychnis blossoms ; there is lucerne, and there is an odd orchis here and there. There is agrimony; there are ambitious daisies length­ening their stalks that they may show their heads above the grass; there are the tiny blue clusters of mouse ear; there is fern in abundance; and there are the elegant grass blossoms that would wave were there a breath of wind. They are as still as painted grass blossoms, because there is no breath of win’d; the sun shines steadily out of a deep blue sky, between the high banks and the hedges, down into the dusty lane.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Obedient to sign-post, which directs us to the right if we desire to find the Philan­thropic Farm School, at Bed Hill, we take the appointed turning; thinking, as we go, How beautiful the blessed earth and sky, and Is this really the world so ugly to us last night with its courts and alleys, and its vice  and misery, and its ragged scholars, in whose minds the wild flowers have been trampled down, and nothing left but baleful weeds and  poisons?

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 It is more than seventy years since there was established in this country a society whose object was to divert children from the paths of crime. We all know that the young criminal is bred under the most pitiable circumstances. Of eighty-two received in. one year at Bed Hill, for example, twenty-seven were orphans, either by the death or trans­portation of their parents, or by being born like brutes, and bred in ignorance of any home. Nineteen were fatherless, and of these almost all had step-fathers; twelve were motherless, and most of these were furnished with step-mothers, ignorant, brutal, and jealous. Only twenty-four had both parents living; and of these, who shall say how many had received parental care?

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Even the most anxious of poor parents must be absent for some ten hours at their daily work, while the child’s school-time—when he has been sent to school—can occupy but six hours in the day. The streets are the child’s playground. If there be so much danger to the best among the children of the very poor, how is.it with those bred in squalor, ignorance, and vice? How is it with the wretched untaught orphans, forced to calculate for themselves the chances of existence, and to beg, or steal, or die? O honorable friend, member for Verbosity, your boy of fourteen—who brought home his prize from school this Midsummer, and told you with some glee of his boyish escapades—is a fine fellow; in spite of his juvenile offences he will grow up one of these days, to be a noble, honest man. But, had he been deprived of your assistance, O honorable friend, of your good thought on his behalf and your wife’s tender solicitude;  had your birthplace been a filthy fever-breeding alley; had no voice of teacher ever sounded in your ears; had you been made a callous man by rubbing constantly against the hardest side of society; had your wife died of the gin with which she sought to drown the despondent sense of a most wretched existence; had you gone to your daily work, leaving your boy in the pestiferous alley; what would he, what could he, have been! He might be the object of parental care to the whole nation represented by the State; since (to take the very lowest ground), it is expensive to allow swarms of young children to grow up yearly into a mass of wild brutes, preying on society. The State might teach and tend neglected children, and compel those parents who are able, to pay pence on their behalf. It might make a parent answerable in some wholesome mea­sure for the crimes of a neglected child. It might send its lifeboats out, to provide for all an opportunity of rescue from the waves of ignorance and vice before those waves had overwhelmed the shipwrecked. These things might be, but they are not. Your child, had you been so much less respectable than you are, would have been ragged, and would have been pronounced by sitting, magistrates, a hardened  little fellow; and the times he had been before the sitting magistrates would have been elaborately counted up; and he would have been whipped so many times, to the great comfort and profit of society, and not at all. to the mockery of reason, justice, and humanity. He would have learned to swear, and steal, and lie; he would have felt no sense of obligation to society since society displayed no sense of obligation towards him. The British nation would have arrayed itself to fight him; to whip him, imprison him, trans­port him, and perhaps hang him. He, war being declared, would feel at liberty to strike the British nation where and when he could —and he would most certainly do it.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 1 Seventy years ago, a body of gentlemen under the name of the Philanthropic Society organised a method of receiving and assisting criminal  children, on a plan that very much resembled the more recent methods practised at Mettray. “The mode of living,” says the old report, for. the children received into the Philan­thropic in 1788-9, “is in distinct houses, as separate families. A manufacturer has a house for himself and his wife, if married, and a certain number of wards, whom they are, to regard as their own children. In these respects the design is to approach as nearly as possible to common life.” The institution indeed began with a single child, who was put out to nurse. It widened, and became eventually incorporated, in the year 1806, by Act of Parliament, and comprised within the walls of a single building in St. George’s Fields under the name of the Philanthropic Society.