CHAPTER XVII.
THE TRAINING OF POOR, NEGLECTED, AND DEFECTIVE CHILDREN.
It is a singular fact that humanity in its highest development so long neglected the poor, and the weak, and the defective. They were practically left out of consideration by educators and philanthropists. The fact that they more than any others needed education and care was not seen clearly enough to lead to definite plans for the amelioration of their misfortunes until the nineteenth century. Dickens must always have the honour of being the great English apostle of the poor—especially of neglected childhood.
He wrote in the Uncommercial Traveller:
I can find—must find, whether I will or no—in the open streets, shameful instances of neglect of children, intolerable toleration of the engenderment of paupers, idlers, thieves, races of wretched and destructive cripples both in body and mind; a misery to themselves, a misery to the community, a disgrace to civilization, and an outrage on Christianity. I know it to be a fact as easy of demonstration as any sum in any of the elementary rules of arithmetic, that if the State would begin its work and duty at the beginning, and would with the strong hand take those children out of the streets while they are yet children, and wisely train them, it would make them a part of England’s glory, not its shame—of England’s strength, not its weakness—would raise good soldiers and sailors, and good citizens, and many great men out of the seeds of its criminal population; it would clear London streets of the most terrible objects they smite the sight with—myriads of little children who awfully reverse our Saviour’s words, and are not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the Kingdom of Hell.
He sympathized with childhood on account of every form of coercion and abuse practised upon it by tyrannical, selfish, or ignorant adulthood, under the most favourable conditions; but his great heart was especially tender toward the little ones who, in addition to coercion and abuse, and bad training by the selfish, the ignorant, and the careless, were compelled to endure the terrible sufferings and deprivations of poverty. He was conscious not only of the material and physical evils to which the children of the very poor were exposed, but of the mental and spiritual barrenness of their lives, and one of his most manifest educational purposes was to improve social conditions, to arouse the spirit of truly sympathetic brotherhood (not merely considerate altruism, but genuine brotherhood) to place the poorest children in conditions that would develop by experience the apperceptive centres of intellectual and spiritual growth, and to direct special attention to the urgent need of education for the blind, the deaf, and the mentally defective.
No other American touched his heart and won his reverence quite so thoroughly as Dr. Howe, of Boston, who will undoubtedly be recognised as one of the greatest men yet produced by American civilization when men are tested by their purposes, and by their unselfish work for humanity in hitherto untrodden paths. After describing Dr. Howe’s work for the blind, he reverently says: “There are not many persons, I hope and believe, who, after reading these passages, can ever hear that name with indifference.”
Dickens charged on humanity, on society, the crime of making criminals. He said with great force and truth in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit: