the
schools; but it contains also full proof of a fact which is anything but
pleasant--of the existence in Liverpool of a need for such an
institution. How is it that when a ragged school like this is opened, it
is filled at once: that it is enlarged year after year, and yet is
filled and filled again? Whence comes this large population of children
who are needy, if not destitute; and who are, or are in a fair way to
become, dangerous? And whence comes the population of parents whom these
children represent? How is it that in Liverpool, if I am rightly
informed, more than four hundred and fifty children were committed by the
magistrates last year for various offences; almost every one of whom, of
course, represents several more, brothers, sisters, companions, corrupted
by him, or corrupting him. You have your reformatories, your training
ships, like your Akbar, which I visited with deep satisfaction yesterday-
-institutions which are an honour to the town of Liverpool, at least to
many of its citizens. But how is it that they are ever needed? How is
it--and this, if correct, or only half correct, is a fact altogether
horrible--that there are now between ten and twelve thousand children in
Liverpool who attend no school--twelve thousand children in ignorance of
their duty to God and man, in training for that dangerous class, which
you have, it seems, contrived to create in this once small and quiet port
during a century of wonderful prosperity. And consider this, I beseech
you--how is it that the experiment of giving these children a fair
chance, when it is tried (as it has been in these schools) has succeeded?
I do not wonder, of course, that it has succeeded, for I know Who made
these children, and Who redeemed them, and Who cares for them more than
you or I, or their best friends, can care for them. But do you not see
that the very fact of their having improved, when they had a fair chance,
is proof positive that they had not had a fair chance before? How is
that, my friends?

And this leads me to ask you plainly--what do you consider to be your
duty toward those children; what is your duty toward those dangerous and
degraded classes, from which too many of them spring? You all know the
parable of the Good Samaritan. You all know how he found the poor
wounded Jew by the wayside; and for the mere sake of their common
humanity, simply because he was a man, though he would h