THE PROTECTION OF CHILDREN.
THE meeting at the Mansion House on Tuesday was some- thing more than one of those many gatherings in aid of philanthropic objects of which the City of London is the theatre. It was called together to meet a real and crying want. It is not enough in a civilisation like ours that laws should be made for the prevention of crime. Some machinery must in many cases be provided for putting these laws into operation. Where offences are committed against individuals strong enough to take their own part, this need is not felt ; and where they are of a very grave character, or specially in- jurious to the public interest, the Government may be trusted to supply it. But there is a great deal of crime which falls under neither of these heads. The sufferers are helpless, yet the breach of the law is hardly serious enough to call for the interference of the Public Prosecutor. One very obvious example is cruelty to animals. It is forbidden by law ; and though the sentences passed are seldom adequate, it is not allowed to go unpunished when a case is fairly made out. But how is a case to be made out ? Animals themselves cannot speak, and the police have usually other things to do than to inspect stables, or watch the movements of carters and cattle-drovers. The solution of the difficulty has been found in the formation of a Society expressly charged with the detection and prosecu- tion of this class of offences. Without such a Society, the law against cruelty to animals would have been of next to no avail. Here and there a policeman would have interfered ; here and there some more than usually energetic spectator would have been at the pains to take out a summons, and to attend and give evidence before a magistrate. But these would have been only exceptions. The rule would have been the other way. The proposed Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is an extension of the same principle. They, too, are helpless ; they, too, are individually beneath the notice of the Public Prosecutor. As the expedient of a Voluntary Society has answered in the one case, why should it not answer in the other?
Parental instinct is not a feeling which can always be trusted where the interests of the children are concerned. There are some fathers and mothers who seem wholly without natural affection ; there are more in whom natural affection goes no farther than a mere brute liking to have their children near them, though it will always be an open question whether this neighbourhood will bring kicks or kisses. In neither case can the child be safely left to the unwatched guardianship of the parent. If he does not mean to be cruel, he may be cruel without meaning it—cruel, that is, from thoughtlessness, or from sudden ill-temper, or from drinking. And very often he will mean to be cruel—he will sacrifice his child for money, and will turn it to all manner of base uses rather than forego the reward that he hopes to gain by doing so. Parents of the former type supply the cases of child-beating which occasion- ally find their way into the police-courts, and which are but a sample, of the much larger number which escape notice. Parents of the latter class supply the cases in which children are sent out to beg in inclement weather, or are put to trades which involve danger to life or limb, or are virtually sold to minister to the vices of a corrupt society. In all these ways, acts of very great cruelty are constantly being committed ; but at present only enough of them become known to convince us that their detection is merely the result of chance. What is wanted is some organisation which shall make it its sole business to bring these things to light. The law is, for the most part, sufficiently precise ; or, if it is not, it will be one function of such an organisation to see that it is made so. But there is ordinarily no one to put the law into execution. The police and the public alike pass by on the other side. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children will take care that this defect is made good. It will be a centre which will give efficiency to a great deal of activity which now runs to waste. Many people may suspect that a child is being cruelly treated ; but unless they have discovered what a police superintendent will regard as incontrovertible testimony, they will be shy of making their complaint at a police-station. Even if they do make it, they will probably find that they are not much attended to. To the new Society, as to a centre of advice and suggestion, those who feel these suspicions will naturally come. They will there learn the real value and significance of the facts they have noted, and find officers ready to tell them how they may make the evidence complete, or who are themselves willing to undertake the investigation without which it cannot be complete. In special cases the officers of the Society will initiate prosecutions, and carry on detailed in- quiries. Particular classes of crime will specially lend them- selves to this treatment, as requiring more constant and minute watchfulness than can be given by any one who is not pro- fessionally concerned in bringing offenders to justice. The analogy between the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals does not end here. The two Societies are exposed to a common danger. There is a great deal of ill-treatment alike of animals and children which lies on the border-line between cruelty and hardship ; and an eager sympathiser will often be tempted to forget that until this border-line has been unmistakeably passed, interference can only do harm. There is a rough common-sense in the public which is easily prejudiced against what it regards as a meddle- some attempt to set aside the immutable laws of circumstance and condition ; and, when thus prejudiced, it finds a prompt reflection in the decision of police magistrates and county justices. The lot of the poor man's child, like the lot of the poor man's beast, is necessarily a hard one. He belongs to a father who has never been taught to restrain his anger when there seems to be any just cause for it, and who finds no method of expressing his feelings come so ready as a blow. His wages, from the moment that he is able to earn them, are an item of real importance in the family income ; and he comes from a class which has never been accustomed to pick and choose its employments. When the members of the new society are first brought into contact with this state of things, they will meet with a great deal that they would like to see altered. A child offends his father, and his father retaliates by a flogging ; and half an hour afterwards some charitable visitor finds the child still smarting under the recollection of the punishment he has undergone, and not unwilling to excite sympathy by a display of the traces which the flogging has left. The temptation to go off to the Society's office, with the request that it will at once take out a summons against this brutal parent, will be great. It will seem to be one of the very cases to meet which the Society was instituted. Yet to yield to it would obviously be unwise. The new Society, if it is to prosper, must not stand between parents and children, unless the parents are demonstrably and grossly in the wrong. There are many things which a father ought not to do, and yet ought not to be restrained from doing. They lie within the limits of his natural discretion; and though he may make a wrong use of that discretion, it does not follow that it should be taken away from him. There could be no worse service done to a child, who will have many hardships to undergo, than to teach him to think himself greatly aggrieved by their occurrence. Do what we will, he must look to be sometimes hungry, and badly lodged, and made to work at ungrateful labour, and subjected to much rough usage. There is abun- dance of real cruelty in the world, over and above all this ; and the new Society will be successful in putting it down in pro- portion as it is careful not to interfere in cases where there is, to say the least, a doubt whether the child has more than hardship to complain of.
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