Besides these changes already mentioned, there needs to be a great change
in the national sentiment on the subject.
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. I
must except Her Majesty's judges, and the best legal magistrates. To hear
cases for children, I would always rather have a lawyer on the bench than
a Sunday-school teacher. 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.
On this subject of children hurt and killed the Church too has acted in
grievously strange ways. It has taught what happened in the worship of the
Syrian Moloch: it has not even known what is done in the worship of the
English Bacchus. Much horror has it felt at the destruction of baby life
on the Ganges; and little, if any at all, at the destruction of it on the
flabby bosoms of English women whom men have made mothers, and to whom
they have given no bread. As an argument for Christianity, it has pointed
to the children abandoned in Pagan Rome, oblivious of the 20,000 a year
abandoned in our own cities and villages, to death, or the parish. Of the
five-and-twenty or thirty little boys once massacred at Bethlehem, it
holds annual mournful commemorations. Of the hundred times that number of
little boys and girls annually smothered within sound of its church bells
it says nothing. When I think of the Church and of child-suffering and
slaughter in England, I cannot help remembering the Biblical saying, as to
whose eyes it is that "are in the ends of the earth." For the "soul" of
children, whatever that may mean, the professional religionist eyes are at
home; but for their suffering and slaughtered bodies, they are away in
far times and far lands. And its purse, and its heart has gone there too.
A grand opportunity is now afforded to stamp cruelty to children out of
the land. The law has come to be grandly right. Will the men who wear the
name of that greatest friend of children the world ever contained meet the
opportunity, find the money to discover the crimes and to enforce the law
against them?
I hear you murmur, "The police! It is the work of the police to do that."
That is not true. 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?
The new law has been created by Christian labour. It is the expression of
Christian sentiment. It must be enforced by Christian money.
To enforce the splendid new law, the Society is seeking to raise its
income to L15,000 a year. In the enforcement of the Factory Acts L30,000 a
year is spent. In the enforcement of the Act for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals L29,000 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? Contributions may be sent to JOHN FAULKNER
(_Secretary_), 7 Harpur Street, Bloomsbury, London, W.C.