s maintained, taught trades, and the drum and fife; and fairly
started in life. The soundest charity is not that which provides food and
homes for the destitute, but treadmills for those who make them destitute.
Not that the one ought not to be done, but that the other ought not to be
left undone.

6. Even the Gospel has been pleaded as a reason for letting the savage
have his way with his child. "Get men converted; you cannot change hearts
by laws," it is said. This is wholly true. But what is needed is not to
change hearts, but to change conduct; to make men keep blows and boots off
babies' limbs, and to put bread into sadly empty little stomachs. And a
free use of the treadmill, though it cannot do more, can do that; and does
it gloriously. And where it fails, I would use the cat. God has put a
cuticle under the skin as the final resort of argument. Where every other
part of the man is "past feeling," it is a divine duty to get at that. The
first object of a Christian nation is to protect a baby's skin, not a
man's. People speak of flogging as degrading. Degrade! can you, a man who
will batter into a shapeless thing a baby face with his fist?

It will be impossible to even mention the hosts of those especial
defilements and injuries done to girl children. They are vast in number
and incredible in kind, and include large numbers of own fathers as the
fearful criminals. Degrade _these_ men! _Degrade_ them!

IV.

Besides these changes already mentioned, there needs to be a great change
in the national sentiment on the subject.

All these wrongs of a child are the result of the low estimate which
prevails as to the rights of a child. There seems to be little or no
interest in a child as a subject of the Queen and an object of the law. I
must except Her Majesty's judges, and the best legal magistrates. To hear
cases for children, I would always rather have a lawyer on the bench than
a Sunday-school teacher. The religion of pious J.P.'s seems to be to let
people off--adults I mean. It is not always so when it is a child who is
charged. What is wanted in the interests of every form of unhappy English
child life in this country to-day is righteousness, the robust
righteousness of God; and His indignations at neglect of the hunger, or
the sickness of a child. The shameful sufferings of English children
to-day are jointly the work of the English bench and the English brute: of
mawkishness on the bench, of cruelty in the