ss was to train, develop these people
instead of behaving to them as they did to their unfortunate victims."
I admitted a trembling hope that something might be done for the
humanizing of the next generation of our lowest-down people, but
persisted that fear and shame seemed to me the likeliest means to stop
the sickening record of cowardly savagery that week after week comes to
us from all over England--the crimes of adults past all restraints save
forcible ones. One week I kept a list, gathered from two provincial
papers and the "Telegraph." Besides a dozen or so of the ordinary cases
where a man beats and kicks his wife, and policemen and no onlookers
interfere _because_ she's the man's wife, one costermonger had flung
his wife under a loaded van; one navvy had gouged out one of his wife's
eyes, and threatened, in the police court, "to do for her yet"; another
had pounded his wife to a horrible jelly with a flat-iron; another held
his by force upon a red-hot stove; and the last on the list, a collier,
nearly tore his wife in pieces, with the help of a bull-dog, "because
she aggerewated him by giving him a leg of veal for his dinner when
he'd made up his mind to a pair o' boiled fowls!"

But Ronayne says maliciously that Mrs. Malise has resigned me to
obscurity and the fossil period; not because it was hopeless--the
winning me--but because, after all, it didn't seem worth while. True I
had broken from the ranks, set up in business for myself, and earned my
bread for a while--but then how dreadfully ignorant I am. It was bad
enough when I didn't know who Margaret Fuller was, and had never read
Mill on "Liberty"; but the day I owned to a pocket dictionary, and my
unaided helplessness as to double consonants and such vicious words as
_separate_, _niece_, _ascension_, and so on, finished the business.

And no wonder. What do you suppose my Mabel will say, grown tall and
wise like her father, to a mother who knows more about King Arthur and
the Knights of the Round Table than about the real kings and bygone
personages of her own or any other country--a mother puzzled always as
to whether it was Alfred the Great or Sir Humphrey Davy who burnt the
cakes; a mother loving Glastonbury better than almost any spot of
English ground, and believing devoutly that there Joseph of Arimathea
planted his staff that became the winter thorn, blossoming at
Christmas, "mindful of our Lord"; that there in the church-yard of the
first hurdle