THE “INSPIRATION” OF HENRY BERGH ON WHICH THE SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN WAS ORGANIZED
THE JUVENILE COURT, NEW YORK CITY; JUSTICE WYATT ON THE BENCH
When it became known that the Animal Society, as it was called, would interest itself in children who were being ill-treated, the complaints became numerous. It was decided that a separate society should be incorporated as a hand attached to the arm of the law.
Of the various movements that grew out of the protection movement, none was more interesting or attracted more controversy than the endeavours to protect children of the stage. We have seen in the account of the elder Seneca and in the treatment by the mountebanks of children in Paris in the seventeenth century, how easily the unprotected child lent itself to the calling of the vagabond entertainer. While no such barbarities were practised in modern times, it was difficult for many people to realize that the child of five, undergoing training as an acrobat for long hours, was not being brought up in accordance with the modern theory of the obligations of the State toward the helpless.
The importation of children that had been sold by their parents in Italy was also a matter that the Society took up, and in 1879, the white slave question, even now a live question, arose in an endeavour to stop the padroni from bringing into America the minors they had gathered abroad.
Probably the most important question that has come before the Society in recent years has been the proper treatment of those children who, for one reason or another, are brought into contact with the police. One of the first things that the New York Society did was to insist that the children who had to be taken to court should not be mixed with the really criminal. In 1892 an amendment to the Penal Code made the separation imperative, and out of this movement has grown the children’s court movement and the proper study of the so-called juvenile criminal.
Another important branch of the child-protection movement that had its beginning in New York City, was placing laws on the statute book, and then enforcing them, against the sale of injurious liquors to children. Laws tending to protect the morality of children followed these, and in fact almost from the first year of its birth, every year has seen the Protection Society enlarging its field of action until today it hardly seems possible that it was only a few hundred years ago that the very life of a child itself was considered of no importance.
The general law laid down by Spencer, in virtue of which everything passes “from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the indefinite to the definite, from the simple to the complex,” is evident in the history of the progress of the child as a factor in society.
When in neolithic times there was no moral instinct in man, the child’s only hope of life was the parental or rather the maternal instinct, of beings not yet risen to the plain of reasoning animals. In a higher stage of civilization one finds, where the matriarchal régime exists, children have a value, the value of chattels and live stock, though the maternal uncle has more rights over them than their own father.[460] The patria potestas of the Romans was not so strange or unusual as it seemed to Gibbon, for the power of life and death (jus vitæ ac necis) is found among the Apaches, the Botocodos, the Bedouins, and the Samoyedes and is a stage in the development and evolution of the family idea.