Benjamin Waugh

“ Where inhuman parents by such death-dealing agents have done their work, coroner’s juries join hands against the child with the infants’ food and syrup shops, and make fatal suffering quite safe to inflict. Almost the only persons who commit infant slaughter whom these tribunals send to trial are those who in their tender mercies commit it hastily and sharply. For long drawn weeks of agony in dying, inflicted by sham foods, their custom is to request the coroner to pronounce a censure. ”

“ Because the results of all wrong and sinful life in man fall heaviest upon his God and his children, we ought to be prepared to find calamities which follow conditions like these, and to deal with them. They all tend to hurt children, chiefly the youngest.
Side by side with these conditions there is an increasing tendency to regard human beings as protoplasm; to shake off the idea of Jesus as to a living God, the Father of us all, and to account for human life by molecules; to count His judgment day and a supreme judge of robust and wholesome righteousness as superstitions. ”

“ And as regards infantile insurance, that is worse. While in the baby farm, where a child is killed for profit, it is a stranger who kills, in the bad family, where it is killed for insurance money, it is the parent who kills. Neither here in this matter, nor in the statements I have already made, do I make charges against English parents. Most of them would die rather than injure, or even neglect, their child. But there are un-English parents, tens of thousands of them, who, for “a drink,” pawn their baby’s only garment and leave it foodless in a fireless room. ”

“ The religion of pious J.P.’s seems to be to let people off—adults I mean. It is not always so when it is a child who is charged. What is wanted in the interests of every form of unhappy English child life in this country to-day is righteousness, the robust righteousness of God; and His indignations at neglect of the hunger, or the sickness of a child. The shameful sufferings of English children to-day are jointly the work of the English bench and the English brute: of mawkishness on the bench, of cruelty in the brute. ”

“ To these, insurance money can be nothing else than a motive for more or less passive child murder. And other types, it familiarises with the idea of baby’s death and of getting old scores paid off when it happens; which in the [Pg 8] insured child’s ailments acts as an incitive to the reverse of whole hearted care for its life. The system itself is a kind of gambling: a parent bets a penny a week against the insurer’s thirty shillings that his child won’t live. The insurer’s chances are, the general good character of the English parent, and the known penalties of the law for murder. ”

“ Church-goers and chapel-goers may sin against childhood, and men who disclaim churches and chapels may love it. But, though no hard-and-fast line can be drawn between men on this ground, it remains certain that Jesus is the world’s most august protector of a child. The man who leaves its limbs naked, its sickness untended, He sends down to hell. ”

“ The truth of the matter is, that cruelty is wholly independent of surroundings and wages. It is the work of haters of children; of sullen, pitiless, intolerant, dispositions; of men whom there is no pleasing, who resent tiny baby’s little blunderings, or even pretty ways with all the physical power of a grown man, in manners which, if shown by an officer of justice to a convict, would excite the indignation of the whole country. ”

“ Whilst the kind and honest poor may do as best they can for their children, the vicious have had theirs maintained, taught trades, and the drum and fife; and fairly started in life. The soundest charity is not that which provides food and homes for the destitute, but treadmills for those who make them destitute. ”

“ A child’s bad cough, two sore eyes, or emaciation through wasting disease, is a living to its owner. To move charity, children are made to tramp and stand about on cold stone pavements, weary and hungry, all day long. ”

“ It is not the work of the police to discover anything, nor to initiate proceedings for anybody. They are a brave good body of men; but they have their set work to do, and their strict rules for doing it. But, were it so, when you stand before the judgment throne of Him whose will, Jesus says, is that not one little one should either suffer from hunger, or nakedness, or be sick and perish, will you dare to tell Him that you knew that that was His will, but that you left it to the police? ”

“ In no country as in England do children so directly appeal to human sensibilities; and in no other country are pitiful charities so readily shown to them. And so it comes about, that for persons using puny and ill children for the purposes of gain in the streets, England is perhaps the most scandalous country in the world. ”

“ Even the Gospel has been pleaded as a reason for letting the savage have his way with his child. “Get men converted; you cannot change hearts by laws,” it is said. This is wholly true. But what is needed is not to change hearts, but to change conduct; to make men keep blows and boots off babies’ limbs, and to put bread into sadly empty little stomachs. ”

“ The first object of a Christian nation is to protect a baby’s skin, not a man’s. People speak of flogging as degrading. Degrade! can you, a man who will batter into a shapeless thing a baby face with his fist? ”

“ To enforce the splendid new law, the Society is seeking to raise its income to £15,000 a year. In the enforcement of the Factory Acts £30,000 a year is spent. In the enforcement of the Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals £29,000 is annually spent. Is it too much to ask for half these sums for the enforcement of the law for Children, when, without it, their sufferings must continue? ”

“ All these wrongs of a child are the result of the low estimate which prevails as to the rights of a child. There seems to be little or no interest in a child as a subject of the Queen and an object of the law. ”

“ Two pounds ten a week and three pounds a week are received by artisans whose one room for the family costs four and sixpence per week, and even this a toiling wife has in some cases to pay. But some live in “Model Dwellings.” Neither is it ignorance, in the common meaning of ignorance, which tends to produce cruelties to children. Skilled artisans, with a smattering of knowledge beyond their class, considering the proportion they bear to the common run of labourers, are in excess in number and obstinacy of cases. ”

“ There is, too, a growing anti-population theory of which we have not heard much, but which is a kind of open secret, which regards that man as a fool who said of children, “Blessed is the man that hath his quiver full of them,” and the statement of the Prayer Book Marriage Service as to the divine objects of marriage as shameful and degrading. ”

“ They have rather lent security to the inflictor of its sufferings. A mother who has to screen her children from the madness of their drunken father at midnight, since such midnight orgies were introduced into England, has never been allowed—that is, if she were a married mother—to give evidence of the fact in an English Court. ”

“ After 400 wronged children have spent two, three, four, and six months in our Society’s Shelter whilst their maligners were in prison, speaking generally, I may say that charges pleaded in excuse, and accepted in extenuation of outrages, have proved to be mere inventions of cowardly malice. ”

“ The ages of the victims of the most atrocious cases is almost always low. Nor are small families exempt. The size of families in which the most horrible outrages take place is never large, being mostly two, or even one. Poverty is never great. ”

“ Happily, every one of these conditions is changed.
4. One practice of Courts—an almost universal one—I must mention in passing, as most unjust to a child—viz., the custom of accepting testimony against it without any confirmation; and that, too, from the person who has ill-treated it. Men who are cruel to a child easily add to their cruelty a damaging false witness, which, being only against a child, nobody ever prosecutes. ”

“ She held him down to the bed, and tied a cloth round his mouth; when the poker was hot she lifted his little petticoats up, and held the poker on the bottom of his back.” One baby cooed in the cradle, and was startled with a loud thunderous curse; one cried of teething, and was beaten savagely with its father’s big hand; two did the same, and were strapped, hanging by the heels from the strapper’s hand. Besides canes, straps, whips, and boots, belts, and thongs of rope, the instruments of torture have been hammers; pokers, cold, and red-hot ”

“ Nor does higher social position exempt from this evil. Some of the cruel are industrious, and some are idle. Some drink, some do not. Some can talk of protoplasm; and some cannot spell their own names. ”

“ It will be impossible to even mention the hosts of those especial defilements and injuries done to girl children. They are vast in number and incredible in kind, and include large numbers of own fathers as the fearful criminals. ”