_The hereditary taint--Cain, as a child of fifteen--Because he
wouldn't give her a toy--Playing with fire--A heartless lie for a
threepenny-bit--Suicide among children_
|THERE is one phase in the mystery of life in the great City which I
would gladly pass. But it is one of the strangest, one of the least
known, and it is impossible to ignore it.
Only those whose duties or whose studies bring them into contact with
the saddest phase of child-life in London know how terrible is the
picture that could be painted by an artist who, in his desire for
realism, did not shrink from the most painful details.
It is not my desire, nor is it the purpose of these chapters, to take
the darkest view of the sins and sorrows of the City.
The truth--the appalling truth--concerning the phase to which I am
now referring is written in the records of the schools in which the
feeble-minded children of London are specially cared for and dealt with.
In these volumes the family history of the parents of every child is
written, the doctor's view of the child's mental and physical condition
is given, and nothing that can be ascertained for the guidance of the
teachers is left unrecorded.
The authorities have decided--and very wisely decided--that these
volumes shall be bound with metal clasps and locked from the eyes of all
save those who have by their official position the right of access to
them.
There are some terrible family histories in those guarded volumes. The
sins of the parents are there, and the children on whom the sins have
been visited are in the schools for the mentally and physically unfit.
Not always is it sin that has set its mark upon the offspring. Drink
has much to answer for in the deterioration of a race; but here there is
affliction as well--degenerate parents have married and given the world
degenerate children.
Insanity, epilepsy, all the forms of mental instability contribute to
the legion of the lost little ones.
If you could see the record of the parents you would find again and
again that suicide and insanity had occurred in the family. You would
find weak-minded parents with six and seven children--sometimes with
ten. Out of one family of ten that I know only two of the children are
normal. Through the generations the taint has been handed down, and
that is the reason that lunacy is advancing by leaps and bounds, and
the number of the insane is now so great that even the unthinking are
beginning to be alarmed.
I am not going to point a moral here or to urge a reform. This is not
the place. But I have been compelled to state the truth that the reason
for the existence in our midst of a class of children who are dangerous
to the community may be understood.
Here is a lad of fifteen. A few months ago the law decided that the time
had come when the freedom of the home and the streets shall be denied
him, and that he shall be kept where the commission of further crimes by
him will be guarded against.
This lad of fifteen attempted to murder a little boy of six. He met
the boy in the streets, took him to a lonely place, and there savagely
attacked him. The child succeeded in escaping from the homicidal maniac
of fifteen, who later on was arrested and charged at the police-court.
There, when it became a question of the boy's sanity, a circumstance was
narrated to the magistrate which threw a lurid light on the case.
A year previously the boy had taken his little sister of four for a
walk. Two hours later he returned to his home saying that the child had
fallen into the canal and was drowned.
Search was made, and the body of the child was found in the water. But
to get there she had had to force her body through some broken palings,
and portions of her clothing were found on this side of them.
The tragedy passed at the time as an accident. It was supposed the child
in childish heedlessness had got through the palings and fallen in.
There is no doubt in the minds of those who knew the children that
the little girl was deliberately thrust into the canal by her then
fourteen-year-old brother. The boy was a homicidal maniac. His one idea
was to take life. After he had been taken to an asylum many things
came to light. Other children came forward and told how he had suddenly
seized them in quiet places, and how, terrified by his strange look and
his violent actions, they had struggled and escaped, and fled from him
in terror.
The piano is being played in this big schoolroom, and some fifty little
girls are taking part in the musical drill, which is part of their
course of instruction. Many of them are pretty and neatly dressed, but
there is a strange, uncanny look in some of the faces. Yet they are
dangerous, requiring on the part of their teachers the utmost vigilance.
Some of them become furiously angry in a moment, and if a schoolfellow
is the cause of their anger will burst into fits of uncontrollable
rage and threaten vengeance. Others are cunning and wait for their
opportunity.
One of these girls, annoyed at having to mind a baby sister in what she
considered her playtime, took it out with her, went some distance from
home, and left the mite under a dark railway arch near a piece of waste
ground. Then she came back and said that while she was out walking a big
woman had snatched the baby and run away with it.
Fortunately, some one passing the arch soon afterwards heard a child
cry, went in and found the baby, and was taking it to the police-station
when she met the mother, who had gone in search of it.
The girl had stated that it was on the waste ground that the woman had
attacked her, and this led the mother to search in that direction.
Another of these girls--a pretty little maid of twelve--invented a
blood-curdling story which caused the utmost consternation in the
neighbourhood. She declared that she had seen a man kill two children
and throw them into the canal. She described the man, and declared that
it was a half-witted, inoffensive hawker known as "Jim," who sometimes
came about the neighbourhood selling little halfpenney home-made toys to
the children.
The next time "Jim" was seen he had a very bad quarter of an hour, and
might have been lynched if a policeman passing by had not come to the
rescue and heard the story. The child was then cross-examined, and,
apparently frightened by the policeman, said it wasn't "Jim," but
somebody very like him.
Some time afterwards it was ascertained that the girl had invented the
story for the deliberate purpose of getting "Jim" set upon and "hurt."
He had refused to let her have a toy that she fancied for nothing.
Here in a mean street in the neighbourhood of the old "Nichol,"
immortalized by Mr. Arthur Morrison, is a small four-roomed house. It is
occupied by one family who, in this neighbourhood, would be considered
well off.
The head of the family is a man of forty-five. He is of weak intellect
and has epileptic fits. He has an income of a week, derived from
property left him by a relative. The sum is paid to him weekly by a
solicitor. His wife is older. She married him "for his money," and
spends as much as she can get in drink. There are five children at home.
There were seven. The two absent are little boys--one of four and one of
six. The little boy of four is dead. He went out for a walk with the
boy of six one morning and never came back. The elder boy said that his
little brother had run away. The next day a woman, going to her dustbin,
which stood in her little bit of front garden, was horrified, on lifting
the lid, to find the dead body of a little boy. The elder boy had
throttled the younger and put the body in the dustbin. When the tragedy
was inquired into the child said that "something told him to do it."
This Cain of six is now in an asylum for idiots. When he gets his
liberty he will, if he refrains from further criminal violence, grow up
and marry and have a family.
There is no sadder sight than--with a knowledge of this terrible phase
of child-life--to watch these poor little degenerates come trooping out
of the schools where a brave endeavour is being made to save them from
the consequences of their own mental and moral deficiency.
Yes, there is one thing more painful still--that is, to listen to the
prayers of their unhappy parents that the children of whom they are
afraid--yes, literally afraid--may be taken from them and "put away."
"I never know a moment's peace," wailed one unhappy mother. "That boy
has threatened to kill his little sister--and I'm sure that sooner or
later he will do it."
Among these unfortunate children arson is a favourite amusement.
Most children have a desire to play with fire, but here the object
is distinctly mischievous. There is an intention to destroy property
heedless of consequences, heedless even of the risk to human life.
"We shall be burned in our beds by him," said a poor woman one day to
the schoolmistress. "He's set the place afire times when my back was
turned, and the other day he got a lot of paper and shavings together
and lighted 'em _under the cradle_."
The hatred or jealousy of the baby is a painful feature in many of these
cases. It is the jealousy of a mind that is feeble. This jealousy led a
young girl of gentle birth to commit a murder which attained world-wide
notoriety.
Constance Kent killed her baby brother because she was jealous of
him. There are several Constance Kents among these mentally deficient
children, and many a baby meets with a fate which is supposed to be
accidental, but the accident was materially contributed to by a brother
or a sister.
For some of these children certain objects have an irresistible
fascination.
There is no story more remarkable than that of the boy of fourteen in
Paris who had murdered first an old woman and then an old man, solely in
older to get possession of the cheap watches they wore.
After the boy's arrest several watches were found concealed in his home.
They had no money value to him. He was simply collecting watches, and
did not hesitate to kill in order to add to the number.
To get possession of some trifling and valueless ornament, a string
of beads, a penny brooch, a toy, a few marbles, young children of the
unfortunate class I am dealing with have laid the most elaborate plans.
One youthful desperado noticed that a little girl on Sundays wore
a string of beads to which was attached a lucky threepenny-bit--a
threepenny-bit with a hole in it.
The child was always with an elder sister on Sundays, and there was no
chance of a highway robbery. Moreover, the children knew the boy, and if
he snatched the necklace they would tell their parents who did it.
He wormed himself into the confidence of the children, and ascertained
that on week-days the necklace was kept put away in a drawer in the
bedroom with the Sunday clothes.
On that information he acted. One day, when only the mother was at home,
the sisters being out playing in another street near the school, the
young hopeful suddenly rushed into her room. "Oh, Mrs. Jones," he
exclaimed, "there's a little girl been run over in the next street,
and I think it's your Annie!"
Off went Mrs. Jones, and the boy instantly made his way into the
bedroom, found the drawer, opened it, and abstracted the necklace with
the lucky threepenny-bit on it.
In all the cases that I know of childish criminality of the insane
type--none of these children are of normal intellect--there is a family
history which accounts for everything.
In the case of a little lad who broke into a house for the sole purpose
of killing a canary--and he killed it cruelly--the mother and father
were "afflicted," and the eight children of the family were all of
violent temper and a source of constant annoyance to the neighbours. Six
of them had been certified for "special instruction"--i.e., to be sent
to the schools specially arranged for the feeble-minded.
It was for a long time a widely entertained idea that for a great deal
of juvenile crime the sensational stories called "Penny Dreadfuls" were
largely responsible.
In the worst cases of juvenile crime--or, it would be fairer to say,
of juvenile insanity with a criminal tendency--of which I have had
personal knowledge, there has been no fiction reading at all. The appeal
to the imagination has been wholly lacking. The children have acted on
their own initiative or the suggestion of a companion suffering from a
similar lack of moral sense.
Here are two boys who broke into a church--one is fourteen, the other
fifteen. Their object was to get at the offertory box in which they had
seen money placed. On the younger boy when he was caught was found a
common table-knife which he had taken from his home.
Asked what he had taken the knife with him for, he said without the
slightest hesitation, "To stick into anybody that tried to nab me."
It was fortunate for the policeman who caught the lad as he came out of
the church that he seized his quarry by both arms; otherwise he might
have had practical proof of what the knife was carried for.
Suicide among children is officially announced to be on the increase.
Suicide among children--the idea is terrible! One can hardly connect
childhood with deliberate self-destruction. How, one asks oneself, can
a child have become so melancholy, so depressed, so weary of life as
to seek that which for all normal children has an element of terror in
it--death?
The answer is that a large number of attempts at suicide by children are
not caused by melancholia, but by insane malice or ungovernable temper.
The dominant idea is the idea of causing trouble and pain to others. A
little girl who attempted to commit suicide by throwing herself into a
canal explained after she had been rescued that she did it to _upset her
mother._
I have dwelt reluctantly on this feature of our modern life--this
outcome of the stress of civilization. I have made no mention of one
phase of it with which the police-courts are, unfortunately, only too
familiar. For its details you must turn to the records of rescue homes
in which the cases are set out of girls of tender years who have been
"rescued." But it is impossible to ignore the feature itself in dealing
with the mysteries, or little-known phases, of London life.
The extent of the evil is not appreciated by the great public, for they
see little of it. Even if they were to see a hundred of these children
learning in the schools or romping in the playground, ordinary observers
would not suspect the tragedy that lies below the surface.
For each of these children is a human document--a document which the
genius of a Zola could extend into a world-shocking realistic romance
like "L'Assommoir," or "Nana."
In the locked and guarded volumes where the family histories of these
children are recorded lie more horrors than ever the great French
novelist dared to blacken his pages with. There are the first and the
second chapters of life-stories that ere they are closed will add many
a strange romance of passion and crime, of madness and murder, to the
mysteries of the town.