Charity has still further been against the suffering child. By its institutions for the ill-used and destitute, in not a few cases it has been an inducement to their ill-usage and destitution. Whilst the kind and honest poor may do as best they can for their children, the vicious have had theirs maintained, taught trades, and the drum and fife; and fairly started in life. The soundest charity is not that which provides food and homes for the destitute, but treadmills for those who make them destitute. Not that the one ought not to be done, but that the other ought not to be left undone.
6. Even the Gospel has been pleaded as a reason for letting the savage have his way with his child. “Get men converted; you cannot change hearts by laws,” it is said. This is wholly true. But what is needed is not to change hearts, but to change conduct; to make men keep blows and boots off babies’ limbs, and to put bread into sadly empty little stomachs. And a free use of the treadmill, though it cannot do more, can do that; and does it gloriously. And where it fails, I would use the cat. God has put a cuticle under the skin as the final resort of argument. Where every other part of the man is “past feeling,” it is a divine duty to get at that. The first object of a Christian nation is to protect a baby’s skin, not a man’s. People speak of flogging as degrading. Degrade! can you, a man who will batter into a shapeless thing a baby face with his fist?
It will be impossible to even mention the hosts of those especial defilements and injuries done to girl children. They are vast in number and incredible in kind, and include large numbers of own fathers as the fearful criminals. Degrade these men! Degrade them!
IV.
Besides these changes already mentioned, there needs to be a great change in the national sentiment on the subject.
All these wrongs of a child are the result of the low estimate which prevails as to the rights of a child. There seems to be little or no interest in a child as a subject of the Queen and an object of the law. I must except Her Majesty’s judges, and the best legal magistrates. To hear cases for children, I would always rather have a lawyer on the bench than a Sunday-school teacher. The religion of pious J.P.’s seems to be to let people off—adults I mean. It is not always so when it is a child who is charged. What is wanted in the interests of every form of unhappy English child life in this country to-day is righteousness, the robust righteousness of God; and His indignations at neglect of the hunger, or the sickness of a child. The shameful sufferings of English children to-day are jointly the work of the English bench and the English brute: of mawkishness on the bench, of cruelty in the brute.
On this subject of children hurt and killed the Church too has acted in grievously strange ways. It has taught what happened in the worship of the Syrian Moloch: it has not even known what is done in the worship of the English Bacchus. Much horror has it felt at the destruction of baby life on the Ganges; and little, if any at all, at the destruction of it on the flabby bosoms of English women whom men have made mothers, and to whom they have given no bread. As an argument for Christianity, it has pointed to the children abandoned in Pagan Rome, oblivious of the 20,000 a year abandoned in our own cities and villages, to death, or the parish. Of the five-and-twenty or thirty little boys once massacred at Bethlehem, it holds annual mournful commemorations. Of the hundred times that number of little boys and girls annually smothered within sound of its church bells it says nothing. When I think of the Church and of child-suffering and slaughter in England, I cannot help remembering the Biblical saying, as to whose eyes it is that “are in the ends of the earth.” For the “soul” of children, whatever that may mean, the professional religionist eyes are at home; but for their suffering and slaughtered bodies, they are away in far times and far lands. And its purse, and its heart has gone there too.
A grand opportunity is now afforded to stamp cruelty to children out of the land. The law has come to be grandly right. Will the men who wear the name of that greatest friend of children the world ever contained meet the opportunity, find the money to discover the crimes and to enforce the law against them?
I hear you murmur, “The police! It is the work of the police to do that.” That is not true. It is not the work of the police to discover anything, nor to initiate proceedings for anybody. They are a brave good body of men; but they have their set work to do, and their strict rules for doing it. But, were it so, when you stand before the judgment throne of Him whose will, Jesus says, is that not one little one should either suffer from hunger, or nakedness, or be sick and perish, will you dare to tell Him that you knew that that was His will, but that you left it to the police?