place is never large, being mostly two, or even
one. Poverty is never great. Dwellings are often miserable enough, though
not always that. 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. 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.

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.

It is impossible, within my limits, to do justice to the work the new
Society has had to do for drunkard's children, tramp children, stolen
children; acrobats and performing children; step-children, little hawkers,
and friendless apprentices; children insured and in baby farms.

As regards our "baby farms," many of them would be a scandal to a savage
land: they are mere baby shambles. 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. 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 happen