DEGRADED PARENTS AND THEIR CHILDREN.
[To TUN EDITOR OM TIll "SPNCTATOR."J SIR,—In your issue of the 13th inst. there is a review (specially interesting because it agrees with the general view you have been lately urging) of Mrs. Bosanquet's and Miss Loane'e books. With much that you say every one is, or ought to be, in accord ; but you always appear to miss the difficulty many feel who work among the degraded poor, which has led us to the conviction that there is no hope apart from direct State intervention. For example, you say "The best State action can never be an efficient substitute for the family, for the care of mother and father, and the mutual aid of brothers and sisters." If you will insert " good " before "mother," "father," &o., every one will agree. Unfortunately we have to deal with many children whose parents are far from "good," their influence being hurtful in the extreme and their action inhuman. I need not trouble you with cases, which as much as any you would deplore and condemn. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children deals with a large number annually. These children, worse than orphans, are, you will admit, a leading asset of the nation. Their physical, moral, and, in my opinion, religious training is of the highest importance to the State. We send them back to their parents after punishing the latter ; and the children are, to put it at the lowest, lost to the country. What we bold is that to these children the State should stand in loco parentis ; should remove them from the degrading influence of parents only in name ; board them out or put them into institutions like the orphans' homes of Scotland, where children, many of them from the lowest classes, are grouped in about twenty-five "homes," with thirty to forty in each "home," presided over by a well-tried, and so-called, "father" and "mother," trained and educated, and sent forth to become, as I know in the case of the great majority, creditable citizens. As for the parents, we hold that, having failed reasonably to care for their children through evil conduct, and having made it necessary for the State to undertake the duty, they should be compelled to work under supervision, and thus be forced to contribute what otherwise they will not contribute to the support of their children. This is the only method we see to infuse into such parents a sense of obligation ; and it is one of the things we mean by "the blessed words 'social reform.'" It .docs not look as if it ,spelt " pauperisation." May I ask, as one who has read the Spectator for thirty years, what you would propose to do with the ebildren and parents to whom I have referred P—I- am, Sir, &a.,
SOCIAL, REFORM.
[We have never denied that ;there are parents ee degraded and so vieious that it is necessary to deprive them of the right to bring up their own children. We must not, however, fail to remember that it is a necessary evil, and that the State can nester supply the true home . and "the blessed charities of the hearth." If we kill the family by State action, we are destroying the strength of the , nation.— ED. Spectator.]
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