The investigation is, again, rendered more interesting and more important, when it includes those children who have known no guidance from parent, master, or relative, but have been flung into the streets through neglect, through viciousness, or as outcasts from utter destitution. Mixed with the children who really sell in the streets, are the class who assume to sell that they may have the better chance to steal, or the greater facility to beg.
Before I classify what I consider to be the causes which have driven children to a street career, with all its hardening consequences, I may point out that culpability cannot be imputed to them at the commencement of their course of life. They have been either untaught, mistaught, maltreated, neglected, regularly trained to vice, or fairly turned into the streets to shift for themselves. The censure, then, is attributable to parents, or those who should fill the place of parents—the State, or society. The exceptions to this culpability as regards parents are to be found in the instances where a costermonger employs his children to aid him in his business occupation, which the parents, in their ignorance or prejudices, may account as good as any other, and the youths thus become unfit, perhaps, for any other than a scrambling street life. A second exception may be where the children in a poor family (as continually happens among the Irish in London) must sell in the streets, that they may eat in any place.
In the following details I shall consider all to be children who are under fifteen years of age. It is just beyond that age (or the age of puberty) that, as our prison statistics and other returns show, criminal dispositions are developed, “self-will” becomes more imperious and headstrong, that destructive propensity, or taste, which we term the ruling passion or character of the individual is educed, and the destiny of the human being, especially when apart from the moulding and well-directed care of parents or friends, is influenced perhaps for life.
The Causes, then, which fill our streets with children who either manifest the keen and sometimes roguish propensity of a precocious trader, the daring and adroitness of the thief, or the loutish indifference of the mere dull vagabond, content if he can only eat and sleep, I consider to be these:—
1. The conduct of parents, masters, and mistresses.
2. The companionship and associations formed in tender years.
3. The employment of children by costermongers and others who live by street traffic, and the training of costermongers’ children to a street life.
4. Orphanhood, friendlessness, and utter destitution.
5. Vagrant dispositions and tastes on the part of children, which cause them to be runaways.
After this I shall treat of (a) the pursuits of the street-trading children; (b) their earnings; (c) the causes or influences which have induced children to adopt some especial branch of a street life; (d) their state of education; (e) their morals, religion, opinions, and conduct; (f) places and character of dwellings; (g) diet; (h) amusements; (i) clothing; (j) propensities.