The Child in Human Progress

by George Henry Payne

The same year that this report was made there was founded in New York a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in imitation of a similar society that had been founded in England, in 1823. Out of that movement in America there grew, in 1874, a movement to look after the rights of children, the first enunciation in terms of modernity of the fact that society must not only punish crimes against children, but that it must prevent them. Following the formation of this society, the first special laws “known in the world were enacted specifically to protect and punish wrongs to children.”

The result of this development was that in 1880 Frederick A. Agnew visited America and after an examination of the work being done in New York and the methods employed, returned to Liverpool, his home, and there in conjunction with Samuel Smith, M. P., founded the Liverpool Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, in 1883—the first society in Europe to prevent wrongs against children. Shortly after this the Earl of Shaftesbury organized a similar movement in London. Then, under the auspices of the late M. Jules Simon, whose work in behalf of children has not yet been fully appreciated, the movement was taken up in France, M. Paul Nourisson and M. Ernest Nusse aiding greatly in bringing about a comprehensive law in relation to the prevention of cruelty to children.

With Lieut.-Gen. D. von Pelet-Narbonne as chairman, the “Verein zum Schutz der Kinder vor Ausnutzung und Misshandlung” was formed in Berlin. In 1899 Fräulein Lydia von Wolfring aided in the organization of the “Wiener Kinder Schutz und Rettungs Verein” with von Krall, Privy Chancellor of Austria, as chairman. Count Borromeo inaugurated the movement at Milan in Italy where the padrone system flourished to such an extent as to indicate that the old Roman theory of the patria potestas was still alive, at least with the peasants. Through the other countries of Europe the interest in the new movement ran and the work was taken up; then into India, China, and South America, until today there is no quarter of the globe where there is not a society, organized for the purpose of assisting the law in preventing crimes against the helpless child.

Nothing indicates better the seeming accidental and casual beginnings of large movements than the formation of this first society in America. Like Vincent of Paul’s recognition of the horrible crimes that were being perpetrated in Paris only when he came face to face with an ill-treated infant, so it was only when it was discovered that, with all the law, there was no legal way of protecting an American child, that the child-protection movement, with its many subsequent laws in behalf of children, sprang up.

A mission worker named Mrs. Etta A. Wheeler had found in what was then the slums of New York that a child, famous after as Mary Ellen, was being cruelly beaten and ill-treated by a man and woman who had taken it when it was less than two years of age from a charitable institution. Some idea of the condition among the slums of a large city of this time may be gained from the statement of a contemporary newspaper that “at least 10,000 young boys roamed the streets of New York by day and took shelter by night in any place that seemed to afford a safe retreat, while their older and more vicious confederates planned how they should succeed in pilfering and plundering the public. The crumbling and rotten wooden docks of the metropolis had been for years haunted by these young vagabonds, and as they were at that time inefficiently policed, they were excellent localities for the incubators of petty thievery.”

Unless these youngsters actually committed a crime, or unless someone collected evidence that they were leading an immoral life, they were free to do what they willed.

Mrs. Wheeler was unable to gather the evidence necessary to remove the child in which she had become interested, and as the stories of the cruelties continued, she went to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, at the head of which was Henry Bergh, whose work in this direction was as notable in this country as was Richard Martin’s in England.

After consultation with the counsel of the Society, Elbridge T. Gerry, it was decided that “the child being an animal” the Society would act. Mr. Gerry after a careful examination of the evidence, sued out a writ de homine replegiando, the child was taken to court, complaints were made against the so-called guardians, and the woman who had cruelly beaten the child was afterwards sent to the penitentiary for one year.

And so, for the first time by legal machinery, punishment was meted out for cruelty to children.