s; which in the insured child's ailments acts as an
incitive to the reverse of whole hearted care for its life. The system
itself is a kind of gambling: a parent bets a penny a week against the
insurer's thirty shillings that his child won't live. The insurer's
chances are, the general good character of the English parent, and the
known penalties of the law for murder.

I regret that I cannot inform you that all these wronged children are
black, and their wrong-doers, heathen inhabitants of heathen lands; that
we have founded a missionary Society to send missionaries to these demons
of wickedness, in Africa or New Guinea. I regret it chiefly because it is
such a shame to us all that these things exist in our own beloved land;
but I regret it, still more, because you will, I fear, care the less to
remedy it.

II.

The remedy lies in numerous directions. Many laws and customs and
doctrines have been (many of them are still) on the side of the torture of
a child.

1. Unhappily, Courts of Law, by their rules of procedure, have not been on
the side of the child. They have rather lent security to the inflictor of
its sufferings. A mother who has to screen her children from the madness
of their drunken father at midnight, since such midnight orgies were
introduced into England, has never been allowed--that is, if she were a
married mother--to give evidence of the fact in an English Court. Boys and
girls under ten who witnessed atrocities committed on a brother or sister,
they, too, were excluded from Courts. And who can estimate the number of
families in which wrongs to children were thus made, legally, absolutely
safe!

Here is a sample of such excluded cases:--Before the baby was many days
old its father soused it on its mother's knee with the contents of a pail
of cold water. On another occasion he seized it while suckling at her
breast, and flung it violently against the wall at the other end of the
room. When its mother was out, he took it into the yard and put it
overhead in a tank of cold water, holding it under till it was with
difficulty recovered. "What do you feed the little devil for?" he would
ask his wife. He was for ever assaulting her for her care of it. As it
got older he pitched it on the floor, and struck it with the legs of a
chair. It grew to dread the sound of his footsteps on the stairs, and
would hide under the bed and lie breathless till he had gone. Such a
brute's wife always, and his family g