4. One practice of Courts—an almost universal one—I must mention in passing, as most unjust to a child—viz., the custom of accepting testimony against it without any confirmation; and that, too, from the person who has ill-treated it. Men who are cruel to a child easily add to their cruelty a damaging false witness, which, being only against a child, nobody ever prosecutes. In consideration of lies, the sentence is often admittedly reduced. After 400 wronged children have spent two, three, four, and six months in our Society’s Shelter whilst their maligners were in prison, speaking generally, I may say that charges pleaded in excuse, and accepted in extenuation of outrages, have proved to be mere inventions of cowardly malice. When the grave, frightened little looks with which they came had passed away, they were full of the ways of sunny childhood. More pleasant docile children, or children more ready to twine their arms around your neck, you seldom find, than have been some little people who had been called liars, thieves, vixens (even infants in arms have been called vixens), and the like—by savages before magistrates as pleas for their mercy. And from every quarter to which children have been sent, the same testimony comes as to the untruthfulness of the charges their parents made in Court, against the children and for themselves.
III.
There are many other things yet to be changed, both in the laws and in the customs of this country, before child life in it will be what it ought to be.
1. The shops of England abound with poisons specially prepared for children. “Syrups” and “foods” as unsuitable for a baby’s stomach, and as fatal, as a bullet would be to its brain or a knife to its throat, are sold to all comers. In some cities, coroners and medical men have a hundred times denounced things in common use as poison to babies; and the Press a hundred times has carried their denunciations into every street, with absolutely no effect on the extent of their use. Boiled bread, corn-flour, sago, “tops and bottoms,” these soon make a strong, week-old baby a sight to see.
2. Still further. Where inhuman parents by such death-dealing agents have done their work, coroner’s juries join hands against the child with the infants’ food and syrup shops, and make fatal suffering quite safe to inflict. Almost the only persons who commit infant slaughter whom these tribunals send to trial are those who in their tender mercies commit it hastily and sharply. For long drawn weeks of agony in dying, inflicted by sham foods, their custom is to request the coroner to pronounce a censure. The coroner then congratulates the parents on the “mercifulness” of the jury. So the grand prerogative of mercy, even, is made to serve against wronged children.
3. But it plays its hypocritical part not at inquests alone. After a disclosure as to conduct to a child which would have made true men indignant, too many magistrates mildly say, “We have taken a merciful view, and shall let you off this time.” “Mercy,” is this! Mercy! to whom? To the man’s suffering child? To the suffering child of other like-minded men in the locality? The magistrate who cures a brute of his brutality, that is the merciful magistrate—merciful to the culprit, to the country, and to the child! Parliament has passed, and the Queen has sanctioned, a new law, which has well been called the Children’s Charter. Yet a canting woman before the bench, with the corner of her white apron and a tear, can wipe it all out. Even a little cant on an idle man’s lips—“no work to do”—will make some J.P.’s disloyal to both Parliament and Crown.
If I happen to be speaking to a magistrate, let me say that no man can show “mercy” to an offender save where he is himself the person offended. That a magistrate should forgive a parent for making a baby’s back bleed is impossible. He may lack justice towards him; he may do that, and then slander the “twice blessed” name, by calling it Mercy. But mercy is impossible to a magistrate to whom an appeal is made on behalf of a suffering child, save as he is the indignant champion of the child.
4. Medical men, too, but with far more cause than all the rest, have made child slaughter safe. Dispensaries give death certificates, knowing nothing of the case save from the possible criminal’s own mouth. And before coroners, they certify the final not the real cause of the child’s not being alive.
5. Even charity (so called) has lent its patronage against little children. In no country as in England do children so directly appeal to human sensibilities; and in no other country are pitiful charities so readily shown to them. And so it comes about, that for persons using puny and ill children for the purposes of gain in the streets, England is perhaps the most scandalous country in the world. A child’s bad cough, two sore eyes, or emaciation through wasting disease, is a living to its owner. To move charity, children are made to tramp and stand about on cold stone pavements, weary and hungry, all day long. Parents, who ought to be flogged for such ways with children, are, because of them, kept in comfort and idleness. For them to cure their child of its ailments, even to nurse it, or to give it reasonable food and rest, would be to lose bread and cheese, and pipe and beer; a sacrifice they do not think of making. And why should they think of making it, while “lovely charity” gives its patronage!
Take one illustrative case:—A baby nine months old, dying of starvation, was the other day taken from the arms of a woman who was exposing its ghastly face and thin limbs to the passers-by in Whitechapel, pleading that she was a widow, and her child was starving. Under the new law, the child was taken from her. It was found not to be her child. She had the loan of it, and night after night, till eleven o’clock, she moved the compassion of the passers-by, and out of baby’s shivers, dying, she made her living. She knew how blind and lazy “charity” patronises a wrong-doer to a child. The wickedest, it patronises the most.