The seven curses of London

By JAMES GREENWOOD, The “Amateur Casual.”
LONDON: STANLEY RIVERS AND CO.
The Pauper Population .— Pauper Children .— Opinions concerning their proper Treatment .— A Hundred Thousand Children loose in London Streets .— Neglected Babies .— Juvenile “ Market Prowlers .”
It is a startling fact that, in England and Wales alone, at the present time, the number of children under the age of sixteen, dependent more or less on the parochial authorities for maintenance, amounts to three hundred and fifty thousand.
It is scarcely less startling to learn that annually more than a hundred thousand criminals emerge at the doors of the various prisons, that, for short time or long time, have been their homes, and with no more substantial advice than “to take care that they don’t make their appearance there again,” are turned adrift once more to face the world, unkind as when they last stole from it. This does not include our immense army of juvenile vagrants. How the information has been arrived at is more than I can tell; but it is an accepted fact that, daily, winter and summer, within the limits of our vast and wealthy city of London, there wander, destitute of proper guardianship, food, clothing, or employment, a hundred thousand boys and girls in fair training for the treadmill and the oakum shed, and finally for Portland and the convict’s mark.
It is these last-mentioned hundred thousand, rather than the four hundred and fifty thousand previously mentioned, that are properly classed under the heading of this first chapter. Practically, the three hundred and fifty thousand little paupers that cumber the poor-rates are without the category of neglected ones. In all probability, at least one-half of that vast number never were victims of neglect, in the true sense of the term. Mr. Bumble derives his foster children from sources innumerable. There are those that are born in the “house,” and who, on some pretext, are abandoned by their unnatural mother. There are the “strays,” discovered by the police on their beats, and consigned, for the present, to the workhouse, and never owned. There is the offspring of the decamping weaver, or shoemaker, who goes on tramp “to better himself;” but, never succeeding, does not regard it as worth while to tramp home again to report his ill-luck. These, and such as these, may truly ascribe their pauperism to neglect on somebody’s part; but by far the greater number are what they are through sheer misfortune. When death snatches father away from the table scarcely big enough to accommodate the little flock that cluster about it—snatches him away in the lusty prime of life, and without warning, or, worse still, flings him on a bed of sickness, the remedies for which devour the few pounds thriftily laid aside for such an emergency, and, after all, are of no avail, what other asylum but the workhouse offers itself to mother and children? How many cases of this kind the parish books could reveal, one can only guess; quite enough, we may be sure, to render unpalatable that excessive amount of caution observed by those in power against “holding out a premium” to pauperism. It is somewhat amazing to hear great authorities talk sometimes. Just lately, Mr. Bartley, reading at the Society of Arts a paper entitled, “The training and education of pauper children,” took occasion to remark:—