Some Conditions of Child Life in England by Benjamin Waugh

Author:Benjamin Waugh [Waugh, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Family & Relationships, Child Development
ISBN: 9785041207052
Google: yQUkEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Litres
Published: 2021-03-16T02:42:01+00:00

III.

There are many other things yet to be changed, both in the laws and in the customs of this country, before child life in it will be what it ought to be.

1. The shops of England abound with poisons specially prepared for children. “Syrups” and “foods” as unsuitable for a baby’s stomach, and as fatal, as a bullet would be to its brain or a knife to its throat, are sold to all comers. In some cities, coroners and medical men have a hundred times denounced things in common use as poison to babies; and the Press a hundred times has carried their denunciations into every street, with absolutely no effect on the extent of their use. Boiled bread, corn-flour, sago, “tops and bottoms,” these soon make a strong, week-old baby a sight to see.

2. Still further. Where inhuman parents by such death-dealing agents have done their work, coroner’s juries join hands against the child with the infants’ food and syrup shops, and make fatal suffering quite safe to inflict. Almost the only persons who commit infant slaughter whom these tribunals send to trial are those who in their tender mercies commit it hastily and sharply. For long drawn weeks of agony in dying, inflicted by sham foods, their custom is to request the coroner to pronounce a censure. The coroner then congratulates the parents on the “mercifulness” of the jury. So the grand prerogative of mercy, even, is made to serve against wronged children.

3. But it plays its hypocritical part not at inquests alone. After a disclosure as to conduct to a child which would have made true men indignant, too many magistrates mildly say, “We have taken a merciful view, and shall let you off this time.” “Mercy,” is this! Mercy! to whom? To the man’s suffering child? To the suffering child of other like-minded men in the locality? The magistrate who cures a brute of his brutality, that is the merciful magistrate—merciful to the culprit, to the country, and to the child! Parliament has passed, and the Queen has sanctioned, a new law, which has well been called the Children’s Charter. Yet a canting woman before the bench, with the corner of her white apron and a tear, can wipe it all out. Even a little cant on an idle man’s lips—“no work to do”—will make some J.P.’s disloyal to both Parliament and Crown.

If I happen to be speaking to a magistrate, let me say that no man can show “mercy” to an offender save where he is himself the person offended. That a magistrate should forgive a parent for making a baby’s back bleed is impossible. He may lack justice towards him; he may do that, and then slander the “twice blessed” name, by calling it Mercy. But mercy is impossible to a magistrate to whom an appeal is made on behalf of a suffering child, save as he is the indignant champion of the child.

4. Medical men, too, but with far more cause than all the rest, have made child slaughter safe.

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