INFANT WAIFS.
Below the glittering surface of our beautiful civilization, drifting
in the silent undertide is a current of guilt, injustice, and despair
that has no voice to proclaim its misery. But its contagion affects the
highest crest of the uplifted wave. The beings who dwell in these sunless
depths of ignorance have been reached by no humanizing influences, and
when events drive them into companionships that are new, with their
imperfectly developed natures, the results cannot be otherwise than
disastrous. It is from such conditions as these that the majority of our
“unfortunates” and criminals come, and all the philosophic sentimentalism
of the age cannot render a better account for them. With no means, so
far known in this beneficent age, of staying this mighty current, the
victims must be waited for near the bank of the whirlpool into which
they are sooner or later destined to plunge in their mad career. For
this kindly helpful purpose houses of reception, lying-in hospitals, and
infant asylums are built and supported by civic and national governments,
and benevolent, tender hearted men and women, of high social standing,
give their time and attention to the management and direction of these
institutions.
The infant asylums and houses of refuge in Toronto are many, and the
most important ones are large and commodious. From the windows of one of
these fall the softest, mellowest light, for lamps are shaded and turned
low so as not to disturb the innocent sleepers. There are sixty children
in the house all less than two years old. Some are in the arms of their
mothers, some are in charge of some other unfortunate, and others lie in
their little cots alone. Here is one resting as balmily as if the angel
of household love and prosperity had presided at his birth instead of the
darkness of disgrace and guilt. His cheeks are round and full and flushed
with
THE WARM ROSE HUE OF SLEEP,
delicate eyelids cover great blue eyes, and the golden lashes lie like
silken fringes on the soft face. Hair long and curling, the color of a
buttercup is tossed from a fine high forehead, and a shapely tiny hand
and rounded arm is thrust from under the cotton coverlet. He is strangely
out of keeping with his surroundings, this lovely cherub boy, for he
would grace the finest linen and silken hangings of a princely couch.
Happier still he should have formed the golden nucleus of a home about
which all the sweet domestic virtues might have bloomed.
Other little ones look curiously up with half closed eyes and drop to
sleep again, but a wide-awake small boy lifts his dull eyes towards the
matron and stretches out his weary arms for sympathy. In response the
matron bestows upon him a wooden caress that is wholly unsatisfactory to
the child. Soon the tired eyelids will have closed over all the tired
eyes, and save for an occasional small cry the dormitory is quiet for the
night, and the nurse in charge sleeps without serious interruption.
At midnight, sometimes, there is a ringing of the door-bell, a loud
peremptory clangor. The matron goes down, draws the bolts, opens, and
finds a policeman with a small parcel in his arms, or a basket in his
hand.
“Oive brought yez an addition to the family, mum,” says the man of the
baton, and he recites the street and number where the infant was found.
The child is perhaps a few days old, has the scantiest of clothing,
indeed its entire wardrobe may consist of a strip of an old woolen shawl
wrapped around and around it, and it is pretty sure to be drugged into a
stupidity from which it takes some days to recover, and many of them die
of the narcotics. And thus this silent, despairing, dumb under-current
manifests its existence to the world. The mothers of the children that
fill foundling and orphan asylums are from the most ignorant classes.
They are not of the women of the town, compared with whom they are
relatively innocent. Many of them are farm servants, and numbers of them
are immigrants unable to speak the English language. Of the mothers of
the foundlings nothing is positively known; every suspicion is founded on
conjecture. If the child is ever taken by its parents it is by adoption.
The mothers who present themselves with a child in arms, and just from
the hospital, have to pass a board of inspectors for admission to the
home. They are required to remain in the institution six months, and each
TO NURSE A MOTHERLESS ONE
beside her own or take charge of a run-about child. When the mother
goes away she usually leaves the child and pays a weekly sum for its
maintenance or makes it over to managers, who offer it for adoption.
A great many, most of the children who are taken to asylums of this
sort, become candidates for adoption. The work of disposing the waifs in
suitable homes is one of intense interest and anxious responsibility. The
adoption committee is composed, therefore, of the most efficient managers
in the board. Members of this committee come into contact with no end
of queer people and have many strange experiences to relate. The whole
business is the outcome of the criminal side of life these papers are
discussing, and as such these incidents are not incongruous here.
There are so many people and so many different sorts of people desiring
children for adoption that it requires a peculiarly shrewd faculty
and a practical knowledge of human nature to discriminate between the
worthy and the unworthy. The circumstances of all persons wishing to
adopt children are fully investigated, and references as to their
respectability must be presented and approved before a child is committed
to their care. Persons moving into new neighborhoods often intend
passing the child as their own. Strange orders are often received from a
distance—“special commissions,” as manufacturers say. The child must have
eyes of peculiar cerulean blueness, hair of a particular golden color,
fingers tapering, nails pink-tinted, toes graduated to a nicety, and the
limbs dimpled. There is not a doubt but that scores of happy new mothers
could furnish just such a wonderful babe, but this order comes to the
matron and managers of an infant asylum. A woman writes for a baby with
brown, curly hair and large dark blue eyes, and a man—but how should he
know any better?—telegraphs for a child with light curly hair, warranted
to turn dark as the child grows older—the hair, mind you. During a
year not more than three or four children with dark hair and eyes are
called for, whereas people are anxious to get blonde girls, and many
applications are made for children of that description. It looks as if it
would take a strong revolution of popular feeling to restore brunettes to
popular favor.
Certain it is, these good people would not be so fastidious if they got
up their own babies. The greater number of people who take children from
asylums are
CHILDLESS COUPLES
well on in life. A few children are adopted by widowers or widows. Some
are taken by those kind-hearted, unselfish bodies who want something
animate to love; others replace the loss of a dear little one by
installing in its stead one of these little waifs. However, there are
children enough for all whose hearts have mother love to lavish upon them.
Oftentimes the foundling asylum, in its general material capacity, is
a very angel bringing peace and good will to discontented, childless
couples, and sending happiness to distracted homes. An instance of its
good work in this mission occurred in a city not a thousand miles from
Toronto. Late one night a private carriage drove to the residence in a
fashionable portion of the city, of one of the trustees of an asylum. A
woman alighted, passed into the house, and secured an interview with the
lady trustee. The visitor gave first-class references, and by all her
outward manifestations was a person of wealth, and she looked as if she
would require the services of Sairy Gamp in a few days.
“I am fooling the whole of them,” she said, after some preliminary
explanations. “I have been married some years, and am childless, and I am
sure that my husband, who is now in Europe, will desert me on his return.
His affections are completely alienated from me.”
“But what can I do,” exclaimed the trustee.
“Let me have an infant from the asylum to pass on him as my own. I will
settle $20,000 a year on it when it comes of age.”
The trustee told the would-be mother she would look her out in the
morning and consult the other members of the committee. And the woman
departed well satisfied with the result of her visit.
Next day her statements were all verified. She was found to be in easy
circumstances, and in every way capable of taking care of a child.
So with the help of the hospital physician a pretty little girl, whose
young mother on the night of its birth said she did not care what became
of the nasty brat, was selected and the anxious mother was provided with
a baby. No one but the Hospital doctor, the lady trustee and the “mother”
knows the particulars of the dark transaction. The husband returned
and went almost wild with delight. A few months later the trustee and
the doctor were invited to visit the child. They found it lying in a
satin-lined cradle, ornamented with blue ribbon and a white dove atop of
the lace canopy.
“We are the happiest family in the world; my husband thinks there
is nothing good enough for me and that child,” is the testimony of
the foster parent. The neatest part of the deception was that her
mother-in-law was in the house when the child arrived and has never had a
suspicion of its genuineness. Here is an instance where the delusion is
practiced on the mother herself: There are mothers who lose all memory
and mind when their infants are still-born, and go immediately into a
slow fever, from which they do not recover for many months. There was
a case of this sort in one of the most palatial of our city residences
not long ago, and when it was known that the fifth child was dead, the
husband brought a child from an institution, and placed it in its stead.
The mother is transported with joy over her live child. She does not wish
to be told that the babe she loves so much is not her own. She has her
doubts, but she does not wish them confirmed.