THE INSURANCE OF CHILDREN. T HE Bishop of Peterborough has carried
through the second reading in the Lords of a Bill to amend the law relating to insurances on the lives of children. The objects of the Bill are two,—to limit the sum for which the life of a child can be insured, and to secure that the money shall not come into the hands of the parents. By the first clause, no Society may pay more than from £4 to £8, according to the age of the child. By the second clause, no Society shall pay anything at all excepting to the person actually conducting the child's funeral. By other clauses it is sought to make the certificate of death, which must be produced in order to obtain payment, more of a check upon the parents. A Registrar of Deaths is forbidden to give a certificate unless the cause of death has been certified by a registered medical practitioner, or proved by some satis- factory evidence. The compliance of an Insurance Society with the law is secured by a money penalty in the case of the Society, and a personal penalty in the case of any officer or member who is a party to the breach of the law. Is it necessary to pass such a law at all ? That is the first question suggested by the Bill. is the Bill adequate to the need ? That is the second question which presents itself in the event of the first being answered as the Bishop of Peterborough wishes.
Undoubtedly it is a terrible disgrace to us that such a change in the law is wanted. It means that there are English fathers and English mothers who cannot be trusted not to murder their children. They are inferior to the brutes in the article of natural affection. They weigh the life of their child in one scale, and a pound or two over and above their daily earnings in the other, and the scale which holds the life of the child kicks the beam. That is a very grave charge to bring against our countrymen ; yet, if the Bishop of Peterborough's Bill is necessary, it is under this charge and no other that some of them lie.
Unfortunately, it seems hopeless to resist the weight of testimony which the Bishop of Peterborough brings forward in support of his contention. There is a terrible unanimity on this point among Judges, doctors, and coroners. Mr. Justice Day describes the Societies which insure children's lives as seemingly " instituted for the perpetration of murder." Mr. Justice Wills is unable to say how strongly he feels about Societies which tempt people to work the destruction of their own children. A medical man in Birmingham says that, to his painful know- ledge, " it is absolutely true that hundreds of children are murdered in that town every year." Another declares himself satisfied that " any number of children are mur- dered for the sake of the insurance money." Coroner after coroner tells the same story. In short, every one who is brought into personal contact with the facts, every one who sees an insured child when it is ill, or has to inquire into the circumstances of its death, comes sooner or later to the same conclusion. They learn more and more to " look with suspicion on the deaths of young children whose lives are insured."
In view of such a suspicion, Parliament ought not to be too critical of the reasons alleged in support of it. Supposing that it is sometimes, or even often, an unjust suspicion, still, if even in a minority of instances it is well founded, a good case has been made out for a change in the law. This is the more true that the reasons against the change are exceedingly weak. It is a hardship, it is said, to prevent parents from in- suring their children's lives. But what is the motive which justifies such an insurance ? Only the desire to be recouped the cost of the child's illness and death. It would be hard on the parents to forbid them to make pro- vision for the payment of the doctor's bill and the under- taker's bill. These are positive outlays, outlays which a working man has no means of meeting out of his weekly earnings. He is accustomed, and properly accustomed, to provide for exceptional calls of this sort on the principle of insurance. But what more can this principle do for him ? Console him for the loss of his child ? The grief that can be plastered by a sovereign or two is hardly worth soothing at the cost of tempting to murder. A man has no right to give himself a, money interest in his child's death, or -even to purchase a "big drink" by way of consolation. He is putting himself and putting his wife in the way of temptation. If the crime of child-murder could be detected by the methods ordinarily in use, there might be something to be said in favour of the practice. It might then be argued that the risk of discovery and the cer- tainty of punishment are sufficiently deterrent. How- ever convinced a father may be that he would prefer the insurance money to his child's life, he is not likely to mike a similar choice where the life in question is not his child's but his own. But the ordinary methods of detec- tion are useless in cases of child-murder. Insured children are not strangled or poisoned. These modes of disposing 'of them, though undoubtedly they have the advantage of -certainty, are very dangerous, and for the most part quite unnecessary. A little neglect applied at the right time, a diet of insufficient or unwholesome food, a little careless- =mess about exposure to cold and damp, and, as the Bishop of Peterborough said, " the little life is quenched." It is the terrible facility of child-murder that makes it so incum- bent on us to do something to lessen the temptation to commit it. Temptations of some sort there must always be. The bringing-up of a child means expense and trouble ; and where the natural instincts are dead and the sense of annoyance keen, there will be no lack of inducements to leave the child to die prematurely by accident or disease. These are considerations which the law cannot deal with. It cannot make mothers affectionate or fathers well-to-do. But it can deal with the consideration of gain. It can ensure that the parents shall not be positively the richer for their crime. And there are those not a few to whom a ?positive gain is an immeasurably greater temptation than a mere cessation of expense. They will not murder a child to save the cost of its keep ; they will murder it to put the insurance money into their pocket. Will the Bishop of Peterborough's Bill take this tempta- tion out of a parent's way ? We think it will. It would be easy, no doubt, to detect weak places in its provisions, to show that no adequate precaution has been taken against this or that mode of evading them. The under- taker, for example, may be suborned to charge more for the funeral than there is any need to do, with the intention of paying the surplus over to the parents. Or a 'child's life may be insured in more than one Society, and ;the undertaker may send in the same bill two or three times, while only retaining one payment for himself. Or a Society may defy the law, and pay the money to the parents instead of to the undertaker. Such things are ;possible, no doubt, but there is one great safeguard against their frequent occurrence. It must be made worth the Society's or the undertaker's while to incur the risk, in the one case of a £50 fine, in the other of three months' imprison- ment with hard labour. Who is to make it worth their while? Only the guilty parent. But if the guilty parent has to pay blackmail to the Society or the undertaker, he will gain ,nothing at all by his crime. We are not dealing here with large sums of money, or inducements to murder so Vowerful that a man will spend his whole substance in making the crime possible. We have to do with the commonplace, vulgar temptation of a few pounds in hand. How much of these few pounds will remain in the parent's pocket after he has squared the Society or the undertaker ? .None at alL We doubt, indeed, whether the bribe would not have to be supplemented from some other source before the Society cr the undertaker would consent to break the law. On this ground, therefore, there is no %serious objection to the Bill ; and on every other ground it is one that ought to be passed as speedily as possible.
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