As regards our “baby farms,” many of them would be a scandal to a savage land: they are mere baby shambles. And as regards infantile insurance, that is worse. While in the baby farm, where a child is killed for profit, it is a stranger who kills, in the bad family, where it is killed for insurance money, it is the parent who kills. Neither here in this matter, nor in the statements I have already made, do I make charges against English parents. Most of them would die rather than injure, or even neglect, their child. But there are un-English parents, tens of thousands of them, who, for “a drink,” pawn their baby’s only garment and leave it foodless in a fireless room. To these, insurance money can be nothing else than a motive for more or less passive child murder. And other types, it familiarises with the idea of baby’s death and of getting old scores paid off when it happens; which in the insured child’s ailments acts as an incitive to the reverse of whole hearted care for its life. The system itself is a kind of gambling: a parent bets a penny a week against the insurer’s thirty shillings that his child won’t live. The insurer’s chances are, the general good character of the English parent, and the known penalties of the law for murder.
I regret that I cannot inform you that all these wronged children are black, and their wrong-doers, heathen inhabitants of heathen lands; that we have founded a missionary Society to send missionaries to these demons of wickedness, in Africa or New Guinea. I regret it chiefly because it is such a shame to us all that these things exist in our own beloved land; but I regret it, still more, because you will, I fear, care the less to remedy it.
II.
The remedy lies in numerous directions. Many laws and customs and doctrines have been (many of them are still) on the side of the torture of a child.
1. Unhappily, Courts of Law, by their rules of procedure, have not been on the side of the child. They have rather lent security to the inflictor of its sufferings. A mother who has to screen her children from the madness of their drunken father at midnight, since such midnight orgies were introduced into England, has never been allowed—that is, if she were a married mother—to give evidence of the fact in an English Court. Boys and girls under ten who witnessed atrocities committed on a brother or sister, they, too, were excluded from Courts. And who can estimate the number of families in which wrongs to children were thus made, legally, absolutely safe!
Here is a sample of such excluded cases:—Before the baby was many days old its father soused it on its mother’s knee with the contents of a pail of cold water. On another occasion he seized it while suckling at her breast, and flung it violently against the wall at the other end of the room. When its mother was out, he took it into the yard and put it overhead in a tank of cold water, holding it under till it was with difficulty recovered. “What do you feed the little devil for?” he would ask his wife. He was for ever assaulting her for her care of it. As it got older he pitched it on the floor, and struck it with the legs of a chair. It grew to dread the sound of his footsteps on the stairs, and would hide under the bed and lie breathless till he had gone. Such a brute’s wife always, and his family generally (often the only witnesses of a crime against a child), were, till recently, all excluded from Court.
2. And everybody else was excluded from the scene of his wickedness. His house was “his castle,” not to be entered even by a warrant, save if he had stolen a watch.
3. Even when the facts were got at, and legal proceedings taken, every injustice was done to the little sufferer on whose behalf they were taken. It could never be removed from its torturer’s custody. Even when after the hearing of the case, it was committed for trial, still for a period possibly of three months the child had to be left in the custody of the culprit to pamper, to coax, to warn and threaten into the denial of everything on which a conviction could be obtained.
Is it wonderful that, under these conditions of the law, one-half of the brutes towards English children were unpunishable brutes, and practised their damnable deeds in safety?
Happily, every one of these conditions is changed.