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NEGLECTED CHILDREN.

Our neglected and destitute children. Are they to be educated? By MARY CARpenter.

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THE importance of directing public attention to the various educational agencies which are in operation in our country, cannot be too highly estimated, and has engaged the warm and earnest consideration of this Section from the very commencement of this Association. Even those educational institutions which had obtained the highest prestige, and which were supposed to be the most securely fenced round-the most strongly guarded by universal good opinion our great public schools, which have fostered the opening talents and stimulated the rising genius of our most celebrated men -even these have been closely scrutinised, and the revelations of the Public School Commission were discussed by this Section at our last meeting with an anxiety which showed a general opinion of the importance of the subject. The desire of the council of this Association to obtain a similar commission to inquire into the condition of smaller grammar schools and of middle-class education generally, as well as the attention which this last is exciting throughout the country, indicates not less clearly the growing attention which is paid to the education of those who will form the next generation. Descending to a lower grade of society, the distribution of the educational parliamentary grant to the British and National Schools has been the subject of warm and earnest discussion: and the applicability of the provision made under the present Code to the wants experienced by them, has been anxiously considered. The highest and most experienced minds in our country have been summoned to the discussion of these various subjects.

All the schools now adverted to have been intended for the children of persons who can more or less help themselves, and most of whom can take a share in the management of the schools. All these, from the legislator to the labouring man, have it in their power, more or less, to secure for their children, by their own personal effort, such education as they deem suitable for their position in life. It is true that several of these schools are endowed, and that a free education is thus granted to many children among these various classes;-this gratuitous character of the education is not considered to degrade the recipients, and all may be classed together in our present consideration. Now, we would ask, why does the enlightened portion of society so zealously occupy itself with the educational wants of these different classes? It is not that they cannot help themselves. We know that excellent schools are established by working men, and steadily supported by them, though they thankfully accept the pecuniary and intellectual aid afforded to

them by those in a higher rank. The middle classes surely ought to be able to judge of their own wants, and pay their money solely for an education which is really good. Without a doubt the educated gentry and nobility of our country are fully competent, without extraneous aid, to regulate the education of their scns and of their daughters, and none need interfere in their concerns. And yet all these commissions, these committees, these anxious discussions-why do we continually hear of them? Why is there a constant extension of our inquiries? Why does one commission lead on to another, and why do we never feel satisfied as long as gentlemen's sons are only half educated, and their daughters are debarred from university distinctions? Why do we trouble ourselves so much because schools for the middle classes are extremely inefficient, and do not teach the rising generation what their parents ought to wish them to acquire, but do not insist upon, through indifference or ignorance? Why do we make so much effort to give the rudiments of a sound and useful education to those who are to form our working population some ten years hence, though without it their fathers have built our houses, made our roads, and furnished nerve and sinew to our country wherever their services have been required? It is because we, as a country, are emerging from the narrow and selfish condition which made education a class privilege, which led even a prelate of the established Church, some half century ago, to inquire, when asked to subscribe to a public juvenile library, what good a library for lads could do? and which made employers of labour prefer to keep their workmen in ignorance. A sound and enlightened education is now acknowledged to be as important to the welfare of society in general as it is to that of the individual. As the world progresses, and class after class is moving on to take a share in the government of the country-as the masses become influential in united strength, and make themselves felt to be members of the community, and important members of it-so all enlightened persons feel it to be of the highest importance that the intellectual and moral powers of those constituting the masses should be wisely developed, and that those who are blessed with superior advantages should lend them, for the public good, to this great work. It is a great work, and we honour those who are helping it forward. It is our own personal work as members of a community, and we devote ourselves to it with zeal.

But the most important parts of our educational efforts are as yet left unaccomplished. We have been helping those who can help themselves, and who are willing to help themselves in this great matter of education of their children. They do so even at the cost of personal privation, because they perceive its inestimable value. We now turn to those who have neither the will nor the power to do so. Are we, on account of the apathy or misconduct of parents, to remain inactive, to stand by unconcerned and see innumerable evils prepared for the next generation as well as for this, through neglect of the children? Shall we, to our own shame, prove by our

actions that we are willing to help the strong and give to those from whom we hope to receive; but that the weak, whom we deem not worthy of our notice, we will leave to perish morally and spiritually? Physically, we dare not let them perish, for it is contrary to the law of the land. But shall we act as if we ignored their higher natures -as if we regarded them as not of us-only fit to be cut out from among us? May this never be said of our country!

Our Government listens, however, to the claims of many of these wretched ones. Some of them are the children of paupers, who, by this very circumstance, are unable to provide themselves with educa tion. The poor-rates are intended to provide this as well as food, and the guardians ought to see that this duty is fulfilled well. But the country regards it as so important that these children of paupers should be educated, and not grow up stultified in mind, prepared to perpetuate a pauper race, that Parliament grants a large annual sum, say 30,000l. per annum, to secure for these children of paupers a good education. Special inspectors are appointed. to examine these schools, and to make the grant depend on the excellence of the instruction given. Parliament is right in its estimate of the importance of education to these poor children, who have not sinned themselves in being ignorant ;-it is right in taking upon itself the duty, so important to society, of providing for them that education which they will probably not receive from those who stand in loco parentis to them, the guardians of the poor. Again, the country said, and enlightened legislators saw, not many years ago, that a cruel wrong was being done to the rising generation by employing their undeveloped powers in close labour, thus crippling their intellectual faculties, and preventing the possibility of their obtaining even the rudiments of knowledge. The injustice thus inflicted on the factory children was acknowledged by the Government, and the Factory Act appointed for them a half-time system-probably the most valuable kind of education that can be given-with enactments which effectually secured to them good and sufficient instruction. But this Act does not reach numbers of children in our country whose parents wickedly allow their immature minds and bodies to be cruelly sacrificed, almost in infancy, to the desire for lucre ;— they think that the children are their own, and that they may do what they will with their own. The country looked with horror on this wicked assumption, and asserted the right of the young child to grow up in freedom from bondage, even that of parents. A Royal Commission was appointed to investigate these abuses; its report revealed horrors little imagined in these days of civilisation and Christianity, and the public is preparing to secure, by legislation, for every working child in the kingdom, immunity from such bondage, and the same rights in all other factories as are recognised in the cotton factories.

The country does not stop here in its care for the rising generation, the children of this age, who are to be the men of the next. Some have become transgressors of the law even in early years.

Parental authority has not been found sufficient to restrain them from evil. Perhaps no true parental influence existed for these unfortunate young persons; and, left to the guidance of their own unregulated wills, checked by no voice of reason or of religion, they have committed acts, which in technical language would be termed burglary, arson and felony, and other crimes, which within the memory of the older among us were capital offences. Are these children to be left without education, because not only they but their parents have sinned? Do we, human beings, take upon our selves the right to visit the sins of the fathers on the children? Not so our Government. For the good of society, and for the benefit of the child, the parents forfeit the privilege, which they had abused, of controlling their children, while they are still compelled to pay towards their maintenance. The children are cared for, the parental authority is transferred by legal sentence to persons who will undertake their moral, religious, and intellectual training, and an inspector has the special duty of ascertaining, on the part of the Government, not only that care is taken of these children, and that they are taught to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows, but that their intellectual powers are developed, and that they receive proper teaching. The State does not begrudge spending from 131. to 161. per annum for each of these children, considering it a wise economy to enable them to grow up honest, self-supporting citizens, instead of being maintained in a convict prison, at an expense of from 30% to 407. per annum, or spreading moral contagion through the country if at large-a still greater evil to society.

We see, then, that in all these cases-in that of the factory chil dren, of the children of paupers and the orphans, of children who, generally through parental neglect, show proclivity to crime, or who have actually fallen into it-in all these cases, the Government has acted on the principle that the fault of parents is rather a claim for public help for the child, than a reason why it should be passed by in neglect; and that it is the duty of the Government to enable every child to receive a free development of its powers with a good education. The public has not lagged behind the Government in its appreciation of this principle, as, step by step, it has advanced; but, on the contrary, has urged it on. The children in our pauper schools, formerly an object of contempt and scorn, are beginning to receive public sympathy, and more enlightened efforts are being made in many places to secure for them a better practical education, and to enable them to take their fit place in society. The children who had been under a sentence of the law, used to be regarded as beyond the pale of even social sympathy; but now the public show their true appreciation of what is being done for them by the combined efforts of Government, and of Christian labourers, by receiving them willingly into their workshops, and even into their homes.

But the work is not yet done. A large and increasing part of the population consists of families whose children are miserably poor, ignorant, and wretched, though they themselves are not paupers;

they are struggling to provide for the physical wants of their children without parish help, but they cannot give education to them; it may be that they are themselves so totally degraded that they do not care to do so, and thence their children grow up as ignorant and corrupt as they are themselves. Had they been paupers, or had their children been transgressors of the law, they would have been cared for; but now they are left in their low and untaught condition, preparing to furnish to the country an ever-increasing supply of paupers and criminals for our workhouses and gaols.

These are the children for whom, destitute and neglected and ignorant as they are, swarming in our large cities, and there to be numbered, not by hundreds nor by thousands, but by tens of thousands, and perhaps even by millions, that I now earnestly entreat the help of this Association. These are the children who have hitherto been practically ignored by the Educational Council of the nation, and whose welfare is never considered by them, while they largely bestow their funds in training highly-educated teachers, and in paying for the knowledge instilled into the respectable children of the higher or wage class. These are the children for whom, passed by on the world's highway, as they have so long been, none raised a voice, when so loud a cry of complaint and indignation went up from those who had been large recipients of the public money, when the new regulations of the Revised Code made them tremble for future supplies. The educated classes look with scorn on these children of ignorance, as unworthy to receive the privilege of learning, which they themselves have now learned to value.

We shall be told, however, that the class of children for whom we plead cannot be defined, and, consequently, does not exist; that the Royal Commission on Education did not consider them deserving of attention; and that a Committee of the House of Commons, sitting expressly to investigate this very subject, reported, without advising any provision to be made for them. But we are well aware that the advance of the session led that committee to close its labours without calling important witnesses, who were ready to attend, from all the large towns of England; consequently, that its report was greatly founded on the condition of London, where the peculiar advantages possessed by schools under the patronage of Lord Shaftesbury, prevented the need being felt for increased pecuniary help. We know, too, that the agents of education commissioners do not always penetrate the back slums of cities to which they are strangers; and that the inspection only of school registers, even although it be a ragged school, by no means gives a true idea of the real condition of the families mentioned in them. We know, in fine, that it is quite impossible for council officers, inspectors, or commissioners, to comprehend the moral destitution of the country, as those do whose duties lead them into those haunts of vice-those back slums, of the wretchedness of which, the favoured portion of the population have no conception, and which they would gladly believe have no exis tence. Hence the apathy which generally exists respecting them;