And what was the remedy?
To take away the father, the breadwinner, to prison. For insufficient
food and clothes to substitute destitution, for insufficient care to
remove the only one the children had to care for them at all: always
to break up the family.

Worst of all was the question of school attendance: While a child of
three was dying of starvation, the mother was at the Police Court
where she was fined for not sending an older child to school. As she
could not pay the fine her husband was sent to prison for a week. A
child died of consumption. The parents said at the inquest they had
not dared to keep her at home when she got sick, for fear of the
school inspector.

As he had in _What's Wrong With the World_ been fired by the thought
of the landless poor of England, so now these stories stirred Gilbert
deeply. He saw the philanthropists like the Pharisees, unheeding the
wisdom learned by the Wise Men at Bethlehem: saw them with their busy
pencils peering at the Mother's omissions while the vast crimes of
the State went unchallenged. He wrote a poem called "The Neglected
Child" and "dedicated in a glow of Christian Charity to a
philanthropic Society."

The Teachers in the temple
They did not lift their eyes
For the blazing star on Bethlehem
Or the Wise Men grown wise.

They heeded jot and tittle,
They heeded not a jot
The rending voice in Ramah
And the children that were not.

Or how the panic of the poor
Choked all the fields with flight,
Or how the red sword of the rich
Ran ravening through the night.

They made their notes; while naked
And monstrous and obscene
A tyrant bathed in all the blood
Of men that might have been.

But they did chide Our Lady
And tax her for this thing,
That she had lost Him for a time
And sought Him sorrowing.

To most of the _Eye Witness_ group the fight for freedom was so bound
up with the fight against corruption that all was but one fight. I
think that when they looked back they were too much inclined to see
the shadow of Lloyd George behind them as well as around them: that
in fact the Liberal Party of those years had brought with it a new
descent in political decency--a descent which would have startled
both Gladstone and the more cynical Disraeli. Of this more when we
come to Marconi. Meanwhile there was certainly a whole lot to fight
about and the group responsible for the _Witness_, not content wit