n the beams are filtered
through the reek of a court; and these same infants resemble the black
fellows of Western Australia or the Troglodytes of Africa in general
intelligence. I have little heart to speak of the parents who are
answerable for such horrors of crass neglect and cruelty. By laying a
set of dry police reports before any sensitive person I could make
that person shudder without adding a word of rhetoric; for it would be
seen that the popular picture of a fiend represents rather a mild and
harmless entity if we compare it with the foul-souled human beings who
dwell in our benighted places. What is to be done? It is best to
grapple swiftly with an ugly question; and I do not hesitate to attack
deliberately one of the most delicate puzzles that ever came before
the world. Wise emotionless men may say, and do say, "Are you going to
relieve male and female idlers and drunkards of all anxiety regarding
their offspring? Do you mean to discourage the honest but
poverty-stricken parents who do their best for their children? What
kind of world will you make for us all if you give your aid to the
worst and neglect the good folk?" Those are very awkward questions,
and I can answer them only by a sort of expedient which must not be
mistaken for intellectual conjuring; I drop ordinary logic and
theories of probability and go at once to facts. At first sight it
seems like rank folly for any man or body of men to take charge of a
child which has been neglected by shameless parents; but, on the other
hand, let us consider our own self-interest, and leave sentiment alone
for a while. We cannot put the benighted starvelings into a lethal
chamber and dispose of their brief lives in that fashion; we are bound
to maintain them in some way or other--and the ratepayers of St.
George's-in-the-East know to some trifling extent what that means. If
the waifs grow up to be predatory animals, we must maintain them first
of all in reformatories, and afterwards, at intervals during their
lives, in prisons. If they grow up without shaking off the terrible
mental darkness of their starveling childhood, we must provide for
them in asylums. A thoroughly neglected waif costs this happy country
something like fifteen pounds per year for the term of his natural
life. Very good. At this point some hard-headed person says, "What
about the workhouses?" This brings us face to face with another
astounding problem to solve which at all satisfactorily