boy in a tub of cold water, "to
get his dying done;" making another dying boy get out of bed to help to
wash, and knocking him down because he washed so little; breaking a girl's
arm while beating her with a broomstick, then setting her to scrub the
floor with the broken arm folded to her breast, and whipping her for being
so long about it; hanging a naked boy by tied hands from a hook at the
ceiling, there flogging him; savagely beating a girl on her breasts,
felling her with fist, then kicking in the groin, on the abdomen, and the
face with working boots; lashing a three-year-old face and neck with
drayman's whip; a three-year-old back with whalebone riding-whip;
throttling one boy, producing partial strangulation; thrusting the knob of
a poker into the throat of another, and holding it there to stop his
screams of pain?

"Once I saw her put the poker in the fire," said a neighbour (speaking of
an own mother and her child of four and a half), "to get it red-hot. The
child had vexed her. She held him down to the bed, and tied a cloth round
his mouth; when the poker was hot she lifted his little petticoats up, and
held the poker on the bottom of his back." One baby cooed in the cradle,
and was startled with a loud thunderous curse; one cried of teething, and
was beaten savagely with its father's big hand; two did the same, and were
strapped, hanging by the heels from the strapper's hand. Besides canes,
straps, whips, and boots, belts, and thongs of rope, the instruments of
torture have been hammers; pokers, cold, and red-hot; wire
toasting-forks--in one case the prongs of the fork hammered out, the stem
untwisted a little up, making a sort of a birch of frayed wire; a file,
with which the skin on projecting bones had been rasped raw; a hot stove,
on which the child's bare thighs were put; hot fire-grates, against which
little fat hands were held.

Never were even churches put to such Christian purposes as were Her
Majesty's prisons, when they held the doers of such deeds as these, and
were making their backs to well ache with hard labour.

You are shocked at that horrible catalogue. But is it not strange that in
not one of all these cases did anybody, who was troubled about them, ever
think of going to tell a minister of the gospel--you people who claim to
be the successors of the man of Nazareth? Nor did they go to a City
missionary! Of the 1400 cases sent into the office of the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty