CASE OF A DESTITUTE CHILD.

49

benevolence, and under the influence of Christian education; and yet where is the man to be found, that will do, or cause to be done, unto the child, that which he would clearly wish to be done unto him, if he were in its place? What are the few paltry, and yet so much trumpeted exertions, which are now and then made for the supply of a partial and utterly inadequate remedy, when measured by this simple standard of our duty? And yet happy would it be for us, if we had no other sins to answer for, than these sins of omission!

Let not our attention be diverted for the present by those palliatives, those substitutes of Christian education, on the efficacy of which we place too much reliance, and the merits of which, I hope, we shall have another opportunity of discussing. But let us keep in view, on one hand, what society, as a Christian institution, owes to every child, as one who has a claim to, as well as a capacity for, the reception of all the blessings of Christianity, and of Christian civilization-as one who is born into this world for the express purpose of being made holy, and, through holiness, everlastingly happy; and let us examine, on the other hand, what society does for those destitute children, who, having no visible advocate, able or willing to prefer their claims, are comprehended in that powerful appeal of our Lord to every one that professeth his name: "Whoso shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth To form a correct estimate of the influence which such a child receives from society, we must, however, not merely cast a glance upon the more marked periods of his life, when his transgressions bring him under the arm of human justice, but we must view the whole of his existence from the beginning; we must transfer ourselves into his circumstances, and follow the course of his life through its different stages. Let us, then, lose sight for a moment of all the advantages which we have enjoyed from our earliest infancy, and by which that state of feeling, and those habits of thinking, have been developed in us, which

me."

E

50

CASE OF A DESTITUTE CHILD.

lead us, in many cases unconsciously, and frequently even without any moral exertion on our part, to fulfil the common duties of life, and to maintain an upright character, at least in the worldly sense of the word; let us fancy ourselves in the condition of a child, born of vicious and criminal parents, in one of those lanes or alleys, in which the physical and the moral atmosphere are equally corrupt. What will be the lot of such a child? The tender and unconscious look of the suckling is never met by an eye, from which it may drink the gladdening rays of love; never does the soothing influence of parental tenderness calm its soul in the moment of irritation; the brutal glare of sensual satiety is the loveliest object it ever beholds; the irritations of its nature are many, in consequence of the neglect which it suffers, and which must inevitably be productive both of bodily disease and of mental indisposition, whilst every manifestation of those fretful feelings, which arise from a want of all that is wholesome to the body and to the soul, is repressed, or rather provoked at an increased rate, by rude severity or wild passion. As soon as he is able to use his limbs, he is cast off by the unnatural mother, who hates his existence as an interruption to the full indulgence of her vicious habits; and a new epoch of his life begins, during which he passes his time chiefly in the streets, with associates more advanced in age, and more deeply initiated in the mysteries of sin; and the filth with which his body is covered, is but a faint analogy to the moral filth, which is thus gathering up in his soul, at that period of life when the mind and feelings of man are first expanding, to receive with consciousness the impressions of the surrounding world, and when, from the susceptibility of his whole being, the nature of those impressions is almost finally decisive, at least for this life, of his character and pursuits. The parental influence during that period is almost entirely confined to daily brutality towards the child, which increases, in proportion as the child acquires more power to provoke and

to resist it; and it is but a sad compensation for this habitual barbarity, that the child is occasionally dragged along by his parent to the public-house, and allowed to partake of that enervating and brutalizing dram, of which a Christian government encourages the extensive consumption, bartering away for two millions of revenue the health of a whole population, and the morality, not to say the salvation, of millions of souls. In this manner the child may grow up to the age of seven or eight years, without ever coming into immediate contact with, or falling under the direct notice of, any one else but the associates of his parents and their offspring; and if it should so happen, that a parish or a police-officer penetrates into that world of misery and vice in which the child lives, for the purpose of a seizure, an ejection, or an apprehension, the effect which his appearance will produce upon the child's imagination, is not calculated to impress him with the better state of that other world, from which he is an emissary, or to awaken in his mind the idea or feeling of any thing more lovely, more benevolent, more holy. A ghastly fear of the delegates of some mysterious power, which is to all that know it, an object of hatred and terror, is the only trace that such an event can leave behind in the child's heart. But the time is fast approaching, when he will have an opportunity afforded him, by his own experience, of conceiving a more distinct notion of that power. He has now attained sufficient strength of body, and, as a practical consequence of his mode of education, a sufficient facility of disguise, and readiness for lying, to be trusted into the world. The time is come for him when he must earn his own bread, if he have not already been turned to account, by being let on hire to beggars, or sent out on begging errands himself. He is encouraged in his first pilfering expedition by his older associates, whose boldness, adroitness, and good luck, excite at once his admiration, his envy, and his emulation—or, perhaps, introduced in a less buoyant manner to a career, the close of which is so

52

HIS FIRST EXPERIENCE OF HUMAN JUSTICE.

mournful-he is stimulated by hunger, nakedness, and cold. But whatever the stimulants may be, it would require a prodigy of morality-such as his education can never produce-to resist, not a mere temptation, but a positive impulse to crime. The voice of his conscience is silent on the occasion, for it has never been called into action, and is, by this time, driven back into the deepest recesses of his heart, and buried under a mass of selfishness, love of sin, and evil propensities of every kind, which have been nurtured up. Thus he commits the first act which enlists him, in the eyes of the world, among the bad characters. Now, let us suppose, that the happiest chanceat least what our moralists and legislators would call soturns up for him; he is caught up in the very act, and dragged before a police office. Imagine a child, brought up in the manner I have described,-and how many hundreds of children are trained up in exactly the same situation entering the office at Bow-street, or some other police office of the metropolis; he is pushed to the bar through a crowd of persons of the lowest character, to whom the daily display of similar immorality is a feast for their souls. Here there is no expression of sorrow for the pollution of so young a mind, of sympathy for the misery which his appearance bears witness of, nor that look of soul-stirring indignation, which the idea of his transgression might draw forth from the eye even of the benevolent, if forgetting for a moment the unhappy circumstances of the case. All that he meets with there, is the fiendlike merriment of the spectators, and the cold forms of the law, with which he is received by the magistrate, or his subalterns. He is then examined; witnesses come forward against him, in whose depositions, it may be, he recognizes as much treachery and falsehood as truth; and he is ultimately committed for trial, or-which will be far less prejudicial to him, because it preserves him from the contamination of the prison-he is harangued by the magistrate, and some slight chastisement ordered to be inflicted

EFFECT WHICH IT HAS UPON HIS MIND.

53

on him. Now, suppose the magistrate to be the humanest person that ever sat on the bench,-suppose him to be moved by a real feeling of grief at the idea of such early delinquency,-what effect can his exhortation produce upon the young thief, to whom, probably, even on account of the unusual language, the whole is as unintelligible, as an argument on morality in Chinese might be to any of us? All that he will gather from the transaction is, that the person on the bench is the one which commands over all the others in the place; that he is displeased with what he has done; and that he has the power of getting those whipped with whom he is displeased. But there is nothing in the most impressive exhortation which can be delivered on such an occasion, under the forms of law, from a magistrate's bench, that is in any way calculated, to lead the boy to a conviction of the unlawfulness of his act, or that at all opens to him the prospect of a different career, with sufficient inducements to quit the one, to which habit has attached him, for one so new, and so replete with selfdenials; or holds out to him even the bare physical possibility of subsisting in a different one. The only practical inference, therefore, which a boy can draw from this transaction, and the subsequent whipping, is, that it is a bad thing to be discovered in thieving, and that he must be more careful, in future, in the exercise of his calling. And that this is the inference, which most of the unfortunate children, placed under these circumstances, draw from their first experience of the administration of public justice, is sufficiently proved by the sequel of their history, which is invariably to be met with in the records of criminality. But let us see the boy again at liberty, after the public authorities have performed upon him, what is deemed their duty. What change has been produced in his feelings? His evil propensities have not been diminished; it is well if they have not been increased by the addition of a feeling of revenge. Or, has any thing been done to enlighten him respecting his condition? All he can have learnt is, that