The Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Conditions of Child Life in England, by
Benjamin Waugh

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Title: Some Conditions of Child Life in England

Author: Benjamin Waugh

Release Date: April 5, 2010 [EBook #31888]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_NATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF
CRUELTY TO CHILDREN._

SOME CONDITIONS
OF
CHILD LIFE IN ENGLAND.

BY
REV. BENJAMIN WAUGH,

HONORARY DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF
CRUELTY TO CHILDREN.

Head Office and Shelter:
7 HARPUR STREET, THEOBALD'S ROAD, LONDON.
1889.

[Illustration: THE STEP-CHILD.]

SOME CONDITIONS OF CHILD LIFE IN ENGLAND.

[_A Paper read by_ REV. BENJAMIN WAUGH _at the Meeting of the Baptist
Union, Thursday, October 10, 1889, at Birmingham._]

My subject is Some Conditions of Child Life in England. And ought we not
to expect some of these to be sad? No one who reflects can fail to see the
fact that in this country to-day many conditions contribute to make
ill-living people; and to make them regard children as nuisances. Vagrant
habits; gambling; extravagant self-indulgence; idleness; unmarried
parentage, and unfaithfulness in married parents; habitual
drunkenness--all these disturb, and some destroy, the natural parental
instinct. There is, too, a growing anti-population theory of which we have
not heard much, but which is a kind of open secret, which regards that man
as a fool who said of children, "Blessed is the man that hath his quiver
full of them," and the statement of the Prayer Book Marriage Service as to
the divine objects of marriage as shameful and degrading. Because the
results of all wrong and sinful life in man fall heaviest upon his God and
his children, we ought to be prepared to find calamities which follow
conditions like these, and to deal with them. They all tend to hurt
children, chiefly the