NATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF
CRUELTY TO CHILDREN.
SOME CONDITIONS
OF
CHILD LIFE IN ENGLAND.
BY
REV. BENJAMIN WAUGH,
HONORARY DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL SOCIETY
FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN.
Head Office and Shelter:
7 HARPUR STREET, THEOBALD’S ROAD, LONDON.
1889.
THE STEP-CHILD.
SOME CONDITIONS OF CHILD LIFE IN ENGLAND.
[A Paper read by Rev. Benjamin Waugh at the Meeting of the BaptistUnion, Thursday, October 10, 1889, at Birmingham.]
My subject is Some Conditions of Child Life in England. And ought we notto expect some of these to be sad? No one who reflects can fail to see thefact that in this country to-day many conditions contribute to makeill-living people; and to make them regard children as nuisances. Vagranthabits; gambling; extravagant self-indulgence; idleness; unmarriedparentage, and unfaithfulness in married parents; habitualdrunkenness—all these disturb, and some destroy, the natural parentalinstinct. There is, too, a growing anti-population theory of which we havenot heard much, but which is a kind of open secret, which regards that manas a fool who said of children, “Blessed is the man that hath his quiverfull of them,” and the statement of the Prayer Book Marriage Service as tothe divine objects of marriage as shameful and degrading. Because theresults of all wrong and sinful life in man fall heaviest upon his God andhis children, we ought to be prepared to find calamities which followconditions like these, and to deal with them. They all tend to hurtchildren, chiefly the youngest.
Side by side with these conditions there is an increasing tendency toregard human beings as protoplasm; to shake off the idea of Jesus as to aliving God, the Father of us all, and to account for human life bymolecules; to count His judgment day and a supreme judge of robust andwholesome righteousness as superstitions. And this is all full of dangerto child life. Child life and happiness are bound up with the Kingship ofGod. There is but one Supreme[Pg 4] to whom they are “the greatest;” but onehand which has a millstone for the necks of those who offend them, and thedepths of the sea. Church-goers and chapel-goers may sin againstchildhood, and men who disclaim churches and chapels may love it. But,though no hard-and-fast line can be drawn between men on this ground, itremains certain that Jesus is the world’s most august protector of achild. The man who leaves its limbs naked, its sickness untended, He sendsdown to hell.
I.
What, then, should His followers think of such deeds as these, taken moreor less at random, from the list of offences for which, through the actionof the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, by itsLondon Committee alone, two hundred men and women have been tried andconvicted?
Making an ill and dying step-child live in a damp, dark back-kitchen,while the “own” children in the front kitchen sit round a bright winter’sfire; shutting up another step-child to sleep in the coal-cellar, threeothers to sleep next the unceiled roof with one quilt, in theirnight-gowns, wind and sleet and rain finding them; sending a child