CHAPTER I.
STARTLING FACTS.

The Pauper Population.—Pauper Children.—Opinions concerning their proper Treatment.—A Hundred Thousand Children loose in London Streets.—Neglected Babies.—Juvenile “Market Prowlers.”

It is a startling fact that, in England and Wales alone, at the present time, the number of children under the age of sixteen, dependent more or less on the parochial authorities for maintenance, amounts to three hundred and fifty thousand.

Let us return, however, to the hordes of small Arabs found wandering about the streets of the city.  To the mind of the initiated, instantly recurs the question, “whence do they all come”?  They are not imported like those other pests of society, “German band boys or organ grinders;” they must have been babies once upon a time; where did they grow up?  In very dreary and retired regions, my dear sir, though for that matter if it should happen that you are perambulating fashionable Regent-street or aristocratic Belgravia, when you put to yourself the perplexing question, you may be nigher to a visible solution of the mystery than you would care to know.  Where does the shoeless, ragged, dauntless, and often desperate boy of the gutter breed?  Why, not unfrequently as close almost to the mansions of the rich and highly respectable as the sparrows in their chimney stacks.  Nothing is more common than to discover a hideous stew of courts and alleys reeking in poverty and wretchedness almost in the shadow of the palatial abodes of the great and wealthy.  Such instances might be quoted by the dozen.

Who are the Mothers?—The Infant Labour Market.—Watch London and Blackfriars Bridges.—The Melancholy Types.—The Flashy, Flaunting “Infant.”—Keeping Company.—Marriage.—The Upshot.

Instructive and interesting though it may be to inquire into the haunts and habits of these wretched waifs and “rank outsiders” of humanity, of how much importance and of useful purpose is it to dig yet a little deeper and discover who are the parents—the mothers especially—of these babes of the gutter.

I think that it may be taken as granted that gross and deliberate immorality is not mainly responsible for our gutter population.  Neither can the poverty of the nation be justly called on to answer for it.  On the contrary, unless I am greatly mistaken, the main tributary to the foul stream has its fountain-head in the keen-witted, ready-penny commercial enterprise of the small-capital, business-minded portion of our vast community.

In no respect are we so unlike our forefathers as in our struggles after “mastership” in business, however petty.  This may be a sign of commercial progress amongst us, but it is doubtful if it tends very much to the healthful constitution of our humanity.  “Work hard and win a fortune,” has become a dry and mouldy maxim, distasteful to modern traders, and has yielded to one that is much smarter, viz., “There is more got by scheming than by hard work.”

Anyone curious to know the sort of working young female alluded to may be gratified a hundred times over any day of the week, if he will take the trouble to post himself, between the hours of twelve and two, at the foot of London or Blackfriars bridge.  There he will see the young girl of the slop-shop and the city “warehouse” hurrying homeward on the chance of finding a meagre makeshift—“something hot”—that may serve as a dinner.

This, the most melancholy type of the grown-up neglected infant, is, however, by no means the most painful of those that come trooping past in such a mighty hurry.  Some are dogged and sullen-looking, and appear as though steeped to numbness in the comfortless doctrine, “What can’t be cured must be endured;” as if they had acquired a certain sort of surly relish for the sours of existence, and partook of them as a matter of course, without even a wry face.  These are not of the sort that excite our compassion the most; neither are the ailing and sickly-looking little girls, whose tender constitutions have broken down under pressure of the poison inhaled in the crowded workroom, and long hours, and countless trudgings, early and late, in the rain and mire, with no better covering for their shoulders than a flimsy mantle a shower would wet through and through, and a wretched pair of old boots that squelch on the pavement as they walk.  Pitiful as are these forlorn ones to behold, there is, at least, a grim satisfaction in knowing that with them it cannot last.  The creature who causes us most alarm is a girl of a very different type.

At fifteen the London factory-bred girl in her vulgar way has the worldly knowledge of the ordinary female of eighteen or twenty.  She has her “young man,” and accompanies him of evenings to “sing-songs” and raffles, and on high days and holidays to Hampton by the shilling van, or to Greenwich by the sixpenny boat.  At sixteen she wearies of the frivolities of sweethearting, and the young man being agreeable the pair embark in housekeeping, and “settle down.”

It is the expense attending the process that makes matrimony the exception and not the rule amongst these people.  At least this is their invariable excuse.  And here, as bearing directly on the question of “neglected infants,” I may make mention of a practice that certain well-intentioned people are adopting with a view to diminishing the prevalent sin of the unmarried sexes herding in their haunts of poverty, and living together as man and wife.

This is all very well as far as it goes, but to my way of thinking the scheme is open to many grave objections.  In the first place the instinct that incites people to herd like cattle in a lair is scarcely the same as induces them to blend their fortunes and live “for better, for worse” till the end of their life.  It requires no great depth of affection on the man’s part to lead him to take up with a woman who, in consideration of board and lodging and masculine protection will create some semblance of a home for him.  In his selection of such a woman he is not governed by those grave considerations that undoubtedly present themselves to his mind when he meditates wedding himself irrevocably to a mate.  Her history, previous to his taking up with her, may be known to him, and though perhaps not all that he could wish, she is as good to him as she promised to be, and they get along pretty well and don’t quarrel very much.

But what, probably, is the upshot of the good missionary’s endeavours and triumph?  In a very little time the gilt with which the honest adviser glossed the chain that was to bind the man irrevocably to marriage and morality wears off.  The sweat of his brow will not keep it bright; it rusts it.  He feels, in his own vulgar though expressive language, that he has been “bustled” into a bad bargain.  “It is like this ’ere,” a matrimonial victim of the class once confided to me; “I don’t say as she isn’t as good as ever, but I’m blowed if she’s all that better as I was kidded to believe she would be.”

“But if she is as good as ever, she is good enough.”

“I don’t know.  Last, yes!  That’s the beggaring part of it.  Ah, well! p’raps it’s all right, but I’m blest if I can stand being haunted like I am now.”

“Baby-Farmers” and Advertising “Child Adopters.”—“F. X.” of Stepney.—The Author’s Interview with Farmer Oxleek.—The Case of Baby Frederick Wood.

Although it is not possible, in a book of moderate dimensions, such as this, to treat the question of neglected children with that extended care and completeness it undoubtedly deserves, any attempt at its consideration would be glaringly deficient did it not include some reference to the modern and murderous institution known as “baby farming.”

We may rely on it that we are lamentably ignorant both of the gigantic extent and the pernicious working of this mischief.  It is only when some loud-crying abuse of the precious system makes itself heard in our criminal courts, and is echoed in the newspapers, or when some adventurous magazine writer in valiant pursuit of his avocation, directs his inquisitive nose in the direction indicated, that the public at large hear anything either of the farmer or the farmed.

I have spoken of the baby-farmers as masculine, but that was merely for convenience of metaphor.  No doubt that the male sex have a considerable interest in the trade, but the negociators, and ostensibly the proprietors, are women.  As I write, one of the said newspapers lies before me.  It is a daily paper, and its circulation, an extensive one, is essentially amongst the working classes, especially amongst working girls and women.

I write “wholesale,” and surely it is nothing else.  To the uninitiated in this peculiar branch of the world’s wickedness it would seem that, as an article of negociation, a baby would figure rarer than anything, and in their innocence they might be fairly guided to this conclusion on the evidence of their personal experience of the unflinching love of parents, though never so poor, for their children; yet in a single number of this newspaper published every day of the week and all the year round, be it borne in mind, appear no less than eleven separate advertisements, emanating from individuals solicitous for the care, weekly, monthly, yearly—anyhow, of other people’s children, and that on terms odorous of starvation at the least in every meagre figure.

I don’t think, however, that the regular baby-farmer is a person habitually given to drink.  The successful and lucrative prosecution of her business forbids the indulgence.  Decidedly not one of the eleven advertisements before mentioned read like the concoctions of persons whose heads were muddled with beer or gin.  Here is the first one:—

NURSE CHILD WANTED, OR TO ADOPT.—The Advertiser, a Widow with a little family of her own, and a moderate allowance from her late husband’s friends, would be glad to accept the charge of a young child.  Age no object.  If sickly would receive a parent’s care.  Terms, Fifteen Shillings a month; or would adopt entirely if under two months for the small sum of Twelve pounds.