Lastly, we come to the vast, hopeful field, presented by greater care for the young, and better methods of embodying it.
First, let the law protect the young of both sexes up to the legal age of majority from all attempts to lead them into a dissolute life. In most continental countries the corruption of minors is an indictable offense. The English penal code recognizes this principle in property; it is felony to abduct an heiress up to twenty-one, and a young man’s debts, except for bare necessaries, are null and void till he is of age; but, as usual, our English law leaves the infinitely more precious moral personality unprotected. There is no practical protection at any age for an English child from the trade of vice. An unruly child of fifteen or sixteen, or even younger, quarrels with her mother or with her employer, and runs off in a fit of temper. Even if she leaves her parents’ roof, it can not be brought under the law against abduction. No one abducts her; the child abducts herself. Yet the keeper of the lowest den of infamy can harbor that child for an infamous purpose, and he or she commits no indictable offence. It is no wonder, therefore, that the open profligacy of the young forms the very gravest feature of our large towns. Thankful as we are for the honest effort to deal with this monstrous anomaly in English law, shown by Lord Rosebery’s bill, we can not but regret the extreme inadequacy of its provisions, or that the legislature should refuse to extend legal protection from even the trade of vice, to the most dangerous age of a girl’s life, the age of sixteen—the age when, as the medical faculty are agreed, a girl is least morally responsible, and most liable to sexual extravagances, and when we can statistically prove that the greatest number of those who go wrong are led astray. The country will not rest till the legal protection from the trade of vice is extended to twenty-one.
Secondly, let us recognize it as an axiom that parental rights do not exist when wholly severed from parental duties; or, in other words, that the child has its rights as well as the parent, and that its indefeasible right is, in South’s strong words, “to be born and not damned into the world.” Let it be recognized, then, that no child of either sex is to be brought up in a den of infamy, and to attend school from thence to the contamination of the children of the respectable poor, the magistrates being no longer allowed to defeat this beneficent provision of the Industrial Schools Act, and parental responsibility being recognized by the parent being compelled to pay toward the Christian and industrial training of the child; all children living in, or frequenting, thieves’ dens and disorderly houses to be at once removed. Let day industrial schools be formed for the lowest class of children, so as to introduce some classification in our board schools, the want of which is one of their gravest defects. Let us adopt emigration to our colonies for our pauper and destitute children, whenever possible. Any one who has gone into the question can corroborate Mr. Samuel Smith’s statement in his able article in the May number of the Nineteenth Century, that “£15 per head covers all expenses, including a few months’ preparatory training, outfit, passage, etc.” The average cost of each child in the metropolitan district schools is nearly £25 per annum. About 11,000 pauper children are brought up in these large establishments at a cost to the ratepayers of London of £250,000 per annum. Probably each child is kept, on the average, five years, costing, say, £120 in all. Truly Mr. Smith may well add, “with a blindness that is incomprehensible, the guardians have preferred herding them together at a vast expense, and refused till quite lately to allow emigration to be tried.” And for those children who through bad health, or any other disability, are unable to emigrate, and can not be boarded out, as well as children whose drunken and dissolute parents are bringing them up to crime, let there be an order of teaching deaconesses instituted, and a state-aided training college, where educated ladies may receive training in the management of an industrial school, and from which the guardians can supply themselves with mothers for cottage homes on the plan of the Village Homes of Ilford, where the cost of a child is £14, instead of £25. By this arrangement the children would come under higher influence than the uneducated workhouse officials. Hundreds of ladies are wanting remunerative employment, and would gladly undertake this, if they could be put in the way of the work by a little preliminary training, and freed from the necessity of “doing the washing” in the cottage home. And, lastly, let it be a recognized theory that every Christian household has one respectable but rough little girl to train under its own upper class servants, to give her a good start in life, that our houses, with all their culture and refinement, may no longer be strongholds of l’egoisme à plusieurs, but centers for teaching good work, high character, and fine manners—organs for the public good.
And those social atomists who raise their vehement cry about personal rights and the liberty of the subject over all compulsory measures for saving children, I would remind that the question is not of compulsion or non-compulsion; but whether the natural guardians of a child shall be compelled to pay toward its Christian and industrial training, or whether they and I, as ratepayers, shall be compelled to pay for its degradation in prisons, in infirmary beds, and workhouses. Compulsion there is anyhow: but surely no reasonable mind can doubt which compulsion is most in accordance with the true right and true liberty.
And how can I better close than with the impassioned words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, apostrophizing our material splendor, as shown in the great Exhibition of 1851, by the side of our moral squalor:
“O Magi of the East and of the West,
Your incense, gold and myrrh are excellent!
What gifts for Christ, then, bring ye with the rest?
Your hands have worked well: is your courage spent
In handiwork only? Have you nothing best