The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10

by William Cowper Brann

The Protestants had him, but the Dissenters protested against his being given to an Anglican refuge. The scene at the mass-meeting to celebrate young Ginx's rescue from the incubus of a delusive superstition is described with rare appreciation of the foibles of character. The bombast, the cant, the flapdoodle and flubdub, the silly unction of different kinds of preachers are "done to a hair." Five hours the meeting raged, and at last a resolution that the Metropolitan pulpit should take up the subject, and the churches take up a collection for the Baby on the next Sunday having been passed, the meeting adjourned—forgetting all about the Baby. A strange woman took the Baby "for the sake of the cause." He had been provided with a splendid layette by an enthusiastic Protestant Duchess.

"Some hours later Ginx's Baby, stripped of the Duchess' beautiful robes was found by a policeman, lying on a door step in one of the narrow streets not a hundred yards" from the meeting place. "By an ironical chance he was wrapped in a copy of the largest daily paper in the world."

"The Baby was recovered, the preachers "praught." The collections and the donations and subscriptions amounted to thirteen hundred and sixty pounds, ten shillings, and three and one-half pence. How the money was spent is shown in a deliciously absurd balance-sheet. Not quite 100 pounds were spent upon the Baby. The other money was wasted in various forms and styles of "guff." "In an age of luxury," says the Baby's biographer, "we are grown so luxurious as to be content to pay agents to do our good deeds, but they charge us three hundred per cent. for the privilege."

How the police found and treated the Baby is a chapter full of subtle sarcasm, leading up to the still more sarcastic portrayal of the way the Baby fared in the hands of the Committee appointed to take care of him. He was likely to be torn to pieces between contending divines. The debates in Committee are illuminating expositions of different varieties of bigotry. His body was almost forgotten, while the philanthropists were trying to decide what to do with his soul. Few of the reverend gentlemen "would be content unless they could seize him when his young nature was plastic and try to imprint on immortal clay the trade-mark of some human invention."

Twenty-three meetings of the Committee were held and unity was as far of at the last as at the first. The Secretary asked the Committee to provide money to meet the Baby's liabilities, but the Committee instantly adjourned and no effort afterwards could get a quorum together. The persons who had charge of the foundling began to dun the Secretary and to neglect the child, now thirteen months old. They sold his clothes and absconded from the place where they had been "framing him for Protestantism." As a Protestant question Ginx's Baby vanished from the world.

Wrapped in a potato sack, the baby was found one night, on the pavement exactly over a line dividing two parishes. The finder was a business man. He noted the exact spot where the child lay and took it to—the other parish. He would not be taxed for its support. The parish guardians would not accept the child. As the man who found the child was a guardian of the other parish, he was trying to foist a bastard,—perhaps his own—upon their parish. A motion was made to "get rid of the brat." "A church warden, who happened to be a gentleman," suggested the services of a lawyer. The brutality of the guardians as they examined and discussed the child is depicted with terrible power. The lawyer says the Board will have to take the Baby, pro tem, or "create an unhappy impression on the minds of the public."

"Damn the public!" said Mr. Stink, a dog-breeder member of the Board, thus antecedently plagiarizing an American millionaire. The parish accepts the Baby under protest, and a formal written protest addressed to the Baby, name unknown, is pinned on the potato sack. The two parishes go to law about the child. Neither wishes to take care of it. At Saint Bartemeus's workhouse, a notice was posted forbidding the officials, assistants and servants to enter the Baby's room, pendente lite, or to render it any service or assistance on pain of dismissal. The Baby was nigh starvation. The master of the work-house stealthily fed him on pap, saying in a loud voice as he did so, "Now youngster, this is without prejudice, remember! I give you due notice—without prejudice."

The Baby became ill. A nobleman discovered him and laid his case before a magistrate. The papers made a sensation on the Baby's case. There was a terrific hullabaloo. An inquiry was held. The guardians became furious. "The reports of their proceedings read like the vagaries of a lunatic asylum or the deliberations of the American Senate." They discharged the kindly master. The Baby was locked in a room. Food was passed to him on a stick. The inquiry was denounced and the bewildered public gnashed its teeth at everybody who had anything to do with, or say of, Ginx's Baby. "At last St. Bartemeus' parish had to keep him and the guardians, keeping carefully within the law, neglected nothing that could sap little Ginx's vitality, deaden his instincts, derange moral action, cause hope to die within his infant breast almost as soon as it was born." Every pauper was to them an obnoxious charge to be reduced to a MINIMUM or NIL. The Baby's constitution alone prevented his reduction to NIL.

The bill of costs against St. Bartemeus was 1,600 pounds. Just as it was taxed, one of the persons who had deserted Ginx's Baby was arrested for theft. The Baby's clothes, given by the Duchess, were found in this person's possession. She confessed all about the Baby, and so the guardians traced the Baby's father and delivered to Ginx, through an agent, the famous child, with the benediction—"There he is; damn him!"

Mrs. Ginx couldn't recognize the Baby. His brothers and sisters would have nothing to do with him. Ginx took the Baby out one night, left it on the steps of a large building in Pall Mall, and slunk away out of the pages of "this strange, eventful history." The Baby piped. The door of the house, a club, opened and the baby was taken in. It was the Radical Club, but it was as conservative as it could be in its reception of the waif, and it was only in perfunctory kindness that the Club gave him shelter. The Fogey Club heard of the Baby and bethought itself of making campaign material of him. The Fogies instructed their "organs" to dilate upon the disgraceful apathy of the Radicals toward the foundling. The Fogies kidnapped the Baby; the Radicals stole him back. The Baby was again a great "question." However, other questions supervened, although it was understood that Sir Charles Sterling was "to get a night" to bring up the case of Ginx's Baby in Parliament. Associations were formed in the metropolis for disposing of Ginx's Baby by expatriation or otherwise. A peer suddenly sprung the matter by proposing to send the Baby to the Antipodes at the expense of the nation. The question was debated with elaborate stilted stultitude and the noble lord withdrew his motion.