Transcribed from the [1869] edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

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THE
SEVEN CURSES OF LONDON.

By JAMES GREENWOOD,
The “Amateur Casual.”

LONDON:
STANLEY RIVERS AND CO.

CONTENTS.

I.—Neglected Children.

CHAPTER I.
STARTLING FACTS.

The Pauper Population.—Pauper Children.—Opinions concerning their proper Treatment.—A Hundred Thousand Children loose in London Streets.—Neglected Babies.—Juvenile “Market Prowlers.”

It is a startling fact that, in England and Wales alone, at the present time, the number of children under the age of sixteen, dependent more or less on the parochial authorities for maintenance, amounts to three hundred and fifty thousand.

It is scarcely less startling to learn that annually more than a hundred thousand criminals emerge at the doors of the various prisons, that, for short time or long time, have been their homes, and with no more substantial advice than “to take care that they don’t make their appearance there again,” are turned adrift once more to face the world, unkind as when they last stole from it. This does not include our immense army of juvenile vagrants. How the information has been arrived at is more than I can tell; but it is an accepted fact that, daily, winter and summer, within the limits of our vast and wealthy city of London, there wander, destitute of proper guardianship, food, clothing, or employment, a hundred thousand boys and girls in fair training for the treadmill and the oakum shed, and finally for Portland and the convict’s mark.

It is these last-mentioned hundred thousand, rather than the four hundred and fifty thousand previously mentioned, that are properly classed under the heading of this first chapter. Practically, the three hundred and fifty thousand little paupers that cumber the poor-rates are without the category of neglected ones. In all probability, at least one-half of that vast number never were victims of neglect, in the true sense of the term. Mr. Bumble derives his foster children from sources innumerable. There are those that are born in the “house,” and who, on some pretext, are abandoned by their unnatural mother. There are the “strays,” discovered by the police on their beats, and consigned, for the present, to the workhouse, and never owned. There is the offspring of the decamping weaver, or shoemaker, who goes on tramp “to better himself;” but, never succeeding, does not regard it as worth while to tramp home again to report his ill-luck. These, and such as these, may truly ascribe their pauperism to neglect on somebody’s part; but by far the greater number are what they are through sheer misfortune. When death snatches father away from the table scarcely big enough to accommodate the little flock that cluster about it—snatches him away in the lusty prime of life, and without warning, or, worse still, flings him on a bed of sickness, the remedies for which devour the few pounds thriftily laid aside for such an emergency, and, after all, are of no avail, what other asylum but the workhouse offers itself to mother and children? How many cases of this kind the parish books could reveal, one can only guess; quite enough, we may be sure, to render unpalatable that excessive amount of caution observed by those in power against “holding out a premium” to pauperism. It is somewhat amazing to hear great authorities talk sometimes. Just lately, Mr. Bartley, reading at the Society of Arts a paper entitled, “The training and education of pauper children,” took occasion to remark:—

“These children cannot be looked upon exactly in the same way as paupers proper, inasmuch as their unfortunate position is entirely due to circumstances over which they could have no control. They are either the offspring of felons, cripples, and idiots, or orphans, bastards, and deserted children, and claim the protection of the law, frequently from their tenderest years, from having been deprived of the care of their natural guardians without fault or crime of their own. Such being their condition, they must either steal or starve in the streets, or the State must take charge of them. It may further be affirmed that, in a strictly commercial point of view, it is more economical to devote a certain amount in education and systematic training than by allowing them to grow up in the example of their parents and workhouse companions, to render their permanent support, either in a prison or a workhouse, a burden on the industrious classes. The State, in fact, acknowledges this, and accordingly a provision is theoretically supplied for all pauper children, not only for their bodily wants, but, to a certain extent, for their mental improvement. At the same time, it is also necessary that the extreme should not be run into, viz., that of treating them so liberally as to hold out a premium to pauperism. In no case should their comfort be better than, nor in fact as good as, an industrious labourer has within his reach.”

Mr. Bartley is a gentleman whose knowledge of the subject he treats of exceeds that of most men; moreover, he is a man who, in his acts and nature, shows himself actuated by a kind heart, governed by a sound head; but, with all deference, it is difficult to agree altogether with the foregoing remarks of his: and they are the better worth noticing, because precisely the same sentiment breathes through almost every modern, new, and improved system of parochial reform. Why should these unfortunate creatures, “their unfortunate position being entirely due to circumstances over which they had no control,” be made less comfortable in their condition than the industrious labourer,—who, by the way, may be an agricultural labourer, with his starvation wages of nine shillings a week and his damp and miserable hovel of two rooms to board and lodge his numerous family? What sort of justice is it to keep constantly before their unoffending eyes the humiliating fact that they have no standing even on the bottom round of the social ladder, and that their proper place is to crouch meekly and uncomplainingly at the foot of it? Even supposing that they, the pauper children, are “either the offspring of felons, cripples, and idiots, or orphans, bastards, and deserted children,” which is assuming to the verge of improbability, still, since it is acknowledged that the state in which we discover them “is due to no fault or crime of their own,” why should we hesitate to make them commonly comfortable? To fail so to do when it is in our power, and when, according to their innocence and helplessness, it is their due, is decidedly at variance with the commonly-understood principles of Christian charity. It will be needless, however, here to pursue the subject of pauper management, since another section of this book has been given to its consideration. Anyhow, our three hundred and fifty thousand pauper children can have no claim to be reckoned among the “neglected.” They are, or should be, a class whose hard necessity has been brought under the notice of the authorities, and by them considered and provided for.

There are other neglected children besides those already enumerated, and who are not included in the tenth part of a million who live in the streets, for the simple reason that they are too young to know the use of their legs. They are “coming on,” however. There is no present fear of the noble annual crop of a hundred thousand diminishing. They are so plentifully propagated that a savage preaching “civilization” might regard it as a mercy that the localities of their infant nurture are such as suit the ravening appetites of cholera and typhus. Otherwise they would breed like rabbits in an undisturbed warren, and presently swarm so abundantly that the highways would be over-run, making it necessary to pass an Act of Parliament, improving on the latest enacted for dogs, against the roaming at large of unmuzzled children of the gutter. Observe the vast number of “city Arabs,” to be encountered in a walk, from Cheapside to the Angel at Islington, say. You cannot mistake them. There are other children who are constantly encountered in the street, male and female, who, though perhaps neither so ragged and dirty as the genuine juvenile vagrants, are even more sickly and hungry looking; but it is as easy to distinguish between the two types—between the home-owning and the homeless, as between the sleek pet dog, and the cur of the street, whose ideas of a “kennel” are limited to that represented by the wayside gutter, from which by good-luck edibles may be extracted. Not only does the youthful ragamuffin cry aloud for remedy in every street and public way of the city, he thrusts his ugly presence on us continuously, and appeals to us in bodily shape. In this respect, the curse of neglected children differs widely from any of the others, beggars alone excepted, perhaps. And even as regards beggars, to see them is not always to believe in them as human creatures helpless in the sad condition in which they are discovered, and worthy of the best help we can afford to bestow on them. It is next to impossible by outward signs merely to discriminate between the impostor and the really unfortunate and destitute. The pallid cheek and the sunken eye, may be a work of art and not of nature, and in the cunning arrangement of rags, so as to make the most of them, the cheat must always have an advantage over the genuine article. Weighing the evidence pro. and con., the object of it creeping even at his snail’s pace may be out of sight before we arrive at what appears to us a righteous verdict, and our scrupulous charity reserved for another, occasion. But no such perplexing doubts and hesitation need trouble us in selecting the boy gutter bred and born from the one who lays claim to a home, even though it may be no more than a feeble pretence, consisting of a family nightly gathering in some dirty sty that serves as a bedroom, and a morning meeting at a board spread with a substitute for a breakfast. In the latter there is an expression of countenance utterly wanting in the former; an undescribable shyness, and an instinctive observance of decency, that has been rain-washed and sun-burnt out of the gipsy of the London highway since the time of his crawling out of the gooseberry sieve, with a wisp of hay in it that served him as a cradle.

And here I can fancy I hear the incredulous reader exclaim, “But that is mere imagery of course; ragamuffin babies never are cradled in gooseberry sieves, with a wisp of hay to lie on.” Let me assure you, dear madam, it is not imagery, but positive fact. The strangest receptacles do duty as baby cradles at times. In another part of our book, it will be shown that a raisin-box may be so adapted, or even an egg-box; the latter with a bit of straw in it as a cradle for an invalid baby with a broken thigh! But as regards the gooseberry sieve, it is a fact that came under the writer’s immediate observation. Accompanied by a friend, he was on a visit of exploration into the little-known regions of Baldwin’s Gardens, in Leather Lane, and entering a cellar there, the family who occupied it were discovered in a state of dreadful commotion. The mother, a tall, bony, ragged shrew, had a baby tucked under one arm, while she was using the other by the aid of a pair of dilapidated nozzleless bellows in inflicting a tremendous beating on a howling young gentleman of about eleven years old. “Tut! tut! what is the matter, Mrs. Donelly? Rest your arm a moment, now, and tell us all about it.” “Matther! shure it’s matther enough to dhrive a poor widdy beyant her sinses!” And then her rage turning to sorrow, she in pathetic terms described how that she left that bad boy Johnny only for a few moments in charge of the “darlint comfortable ashleap in her bashket,” and that he had neglected his duty, and that the baste of a donkey had smelt her out, and “ate her clane out o’ bed.”

I have had so much experience in this way, that one day I may write a book on the Haunts and Homes of the British Baby. It was not long after the incident of the gooseberry sieve, that I discovered in one small room in which a family of six resided, three little children, varying in age from three to eight, perhaps, stark naked. It was noon of a summer’s day, and there they were nude as forest monkeys, and so hideously dirty that every rib-bone in their poor wasted little bodies showed plain, and in colour like mahogany. Soon as I put my head in at the door they scattered, scared as rabbits, to the “bed,” an arrangement of evil-smelling flock and old potato-sacks, and I was informed by the mother that they had not a rag to wear, and had been in their present condition for more than three months.

Let us return, however, to the hordes of small Arabs found wandering about the streets of the city. To the mind of the initiated, instantly recurs the question, “whence do they all come”? They are not imported like those other pests of society, “German band boys or organ grinders;” they must have been babies once upon a time; where did they grow up? In very dreary and retired regions, my dear sir, though for that matter if it should happen that you are perambulating fashionable Regent-street or aristocratic Belgravia, when you put to yourself the perplexing question, you may be nigher to a visible solution of the mystery than you would care to know. Where does the shoeless, ragged, dauntless, and often desperate boy of the gutter breed? Why, not unfrequently as close almost to the mansions of the rich and highly respectable as the sparrows in their chimney stacks. Nothing is more common than to discover a hideous stew of courts and alleys reeking in poverty and wretchedness almost in the shadow of the palatial abodes of the great and wealthy. Such instances might be quoted by the dozen.

It is seldom that these fledglings of the hawk tribe quit their nests or rather their nesting places until they are capable, although on a most limited scale, of doing business on their own account. Occasionally a specimen may be seen in the vicinity of Covent Garden or Farringdon Market, seated on a carriage extemporized out of an old rusty teatray and drawn along by his elder relatives, by means of a string. It may not be safely assumed, however, that the latter are actuated by no other than affectionate and disinterested motives in thus treating their infant charge to a ride. It is much more probable that being left at home in the alley by their mother, who is engaged elsewhere at washing or “charing,” with strict injunctions not to leave baby for so long as a minute, and being goaded to desperation by the thoughts of the plentiful feed of cast-out plums and oranges to be picked up in “Common Garden” at this “dead ripe” season of the year, they have hit on this ingenious expedient by which the maternal mandate may be obeyed to the letter, and their craving for market refuse be at the same time gratified.

By-the-bye, it may here be mentioned as a contribution towards solving the riddle, “How do these hundred thousand street prowlers contrive to exist?” that they draw a considerable amount of their sustenance from the markets. And really it would seem that by some miraculous dispensation of Providence, garbage was for their sake robbed of its poisonous properties, and endowed with virtues such as wholesome food possesses. Did the reader ever see the young market hunters at such a “feed” say in the month of August or September? It is a spectacle to be witnessed only by early risers who can get as far as Covent Garden by the time that the wholesale dealing in the open falls slack—which will be about eight o’clock; and it is not to be believed unless it is seen. They will gather about a muck heap and gobble up plums, a sweltering mass of decay, and oranges and apples that have quite lost their original shape and colour, with the avidity of ducks or pigs. I speak according to my knowledge, for I have seen them at it. I have seen one of these gaunt wolfish little children with his tattered cap full of plums of a sort one of which I would not have permitted a child of mine to eat for all the money in the Mint, and this at a season when the sanitary authorities in their desperate alarm at the spread of cholera had turned bill stickers, and were begging and imploring the people to abstain from this, that, and the other, and especially to beware of fruit unless perfectly sound and ripe. Judging from the earnestness with which this last provision was urged, there must have been cholera enough to have slain a dozen strong men in that little ragamuffin’s cap, and yet he munched on till that frowsy receptacle was emptied, finally licking his fingers with a relish. It was not for me to forcibly dispossess the boy of a prize that made him the envy of his plumless companions, but I spoke to the market beadle about it, asking him if it would not be possible, knowing the propensities of these poor little wretches, so to dispose of the poisonous offal that they could not get at it; but he replied that it was nothing to do with him what they ate so long as they kept their hands from picking and stealing; furthermore he politely intimated that “unless I had nothing better to do” there was no call for me to trouble myself about the “little warmint,” whom nothing would hurt. He confided to me his private belief that they were “made inside something after the orsestretch, and that farriers’ nails wouldn’t come amiss to ’em if they could only get ’em down.” However, and although the evidence was rather in the sagacious market beadle’s favour, I was unconverted from my original opinion, and here take the liberty of urging on any official of Covent Garden or Farringdon Market who may happen to read these pages the policy of adopting my suggestion as to the safe bestowal of fruit offal during the sickly season. That great danger is incurred by allowing it to be consumed as it now is, there cannot be a question. Perhaps it is too much to assume that the poor little beings whom hunger prompts to feed off garbage do so with impunity. It is not improbable that, in many cases, they slink home to die in their holes as poisoned rats do. That they are never missed from the market is no proof of the contrary. Their identification is next to impossible, for they are like each other as apples in a sieve, or peas in one pod. Moreover, to tell their number is out of the question. It is as incomprehensible as is their nature. They swarm as bees do, and arduous indeed would be the task of the individual who undertook to reckon up the small fry of a single alley of the hundreds that abound in Squalor’s regions. They are of as small account in the public estimation as stray street curs, and, like them, it is only where they evince a propensity for barking and biting that their existence is recognised. Should death to-morrow morning make a clean sweep of the unsightly little scavengers who grovel for a meal amongst the market offal heaps, next day would see the said heaps just as industriously surrounded.

CHAPTER II.
RESPECTING THE PARENTAGE OF SOME OF OUR GUTTER POPULATION.

Who are the Mothers?—The Infant Labour Market.—Watch London and Blackfriars Bridges.—The Melancholy Types.—The Flashy, Flaunting “Infant.”—Keeping Company.—Marriage.—The Upshot.

Instructive and interesting though it may be to inquire into the haunts and habits of these wretched waifs and “rank outsiders” of humanity, of how much importance and of useful purpose is it to dig yet a little deeper and discover who are the parents—the mothers especially—of these babes of the gutter.

Clearly they had no business there at all. A human creature, and more than all, a helpless human creature, endowed with the noblest shape of God’s creation, and with a soul to save or lose, is as much out of place grovelling in filth and contamination as would be a wild cat crouching on the hearth-rug of a nursery. How come they there, then? Although not bred absolutely in the kennel, many merge into life so very near the edge of it, that it is no wonder if even their infantine kickings and sprawlings are enough to topple them over. Some there are, not vast in number, perhaps, but of a character to influence the whole, who are dropped into the gutter from such a height that they may never crawl out of it—they are so sorely crippled. Others, again, find their way to the gutter by means of a process identical with that which serves the conveyance to sinks and hidden sewers of the city’s ordinary refuse and off-scourings. Of this last-mentioned sort, however, it will be necessary to treat at length presently.

I think that it may be taken as granted that gross and deliberate immorality is not mainly responsible for our gutter population. Neither can the poverty of the nation be justly called on to answer for it. On the contrary, unless I am greatly mistaken, the main tributary to the foul stream has its fountain-head in the keen-witted, ready-penny commercial enterprise of the small-capital, business-minded portion of our vast community.

In no respect are we so unlike our forefathers as in our struggles after “mastership” in business, however petty. This may be a sign of commercial progress amongst us, but it is doubtful if it tends very much to the healthful constitution of our humanity. “Work hard and win a fortune,” has become a dry and mouldy maxim, distasteful to modern traders, and has yielded to one that is much smarter, viz., “There is more got by scheming than by hard work.”

By scheming the labour of others, that is; little children—anyone. It is in the infant labour market especially that this new and dashing spirit of commercial enterprise exercises itself chiefly. There are many kinds of labour that require no application of muscular strength; all that is requisite is dexterity and lightness of touch, and these with most children are natural gifts. They are better fitted for the work they are set to than adults would be, while the latter would require as wages shillings where the little ones are content with pence. This, perhaps, would be tolerable if their earnings increased with their years; but such an arrangement does not come within the scheme of the sweaters and slop-factors, Jew and Christian, who grind the bones of little children to make them not only bread, but luxurious living and country houses, and carriages to ride in. When their “hands” cease to be children, these enterprising tradesmen no longer require their services, and they are discharged to make room for a new batch of small toilers, eager to engage themselves on terms that the others have learned to despise, while those last-mentioned unfortunates are cast adrift to win their bread—somehow.

Anyone curious to know the sort of working young female alluded to may be gratified a hundred times over any day of the week, if he will take the trouble to post himself, between the hours of twelve and two, at the foot of London or Blackfriars bridge. There he will see the young girl of the slop-shop and the city “warehouse” hurrying homeward on the chance of finding a meagre makeshift—“something hot”—that may serve as a dinner.

It is a sight well worth the seeking of any philanthropic person interested in the present condition and possible future of the infant labour market. How much or how little of truth there may be in the lament one occasionally hears, that our endurance is failing us, and that we seldom reach the ripe old age attained by our ancestors, we will not here discuss; at least there can be no doubt of this—that we grow old much earlier than did our great grandfathers; and though our “three-score years and ten” may be shortened by fifteen or twenty years, the downhill portion of our existence is at least as protracted as that of the hale men of old who could leap a gate at sixty. This must be so, otherwise the ancient law, defining an infant as “a person under the age of fourteen,” could never have received the sanction of legislators. Make note of these “infants” of the law as they come in knots of two and three, and sometimes in an unbroken “gang,” just as they left the factory, putting their best feet foremost in a match against time; for all that is allowed them is one hour, and within that limited period they have to walk perhaps a couple of miles to and fro, resting only during that brief space in which it is their happy privilege to exercise their organs of mastication.

Good times indeed were those olden ones, if for no other reason than that they knew not such infants as these! Of the same stuff in the main, one and all, but by no means of the same pattern. Haggard, weary-eyed infants, who never could have been babies; little slips of things, whose heads are scarcely above the belt of the burly policeman lounging out his hours of duty on the bridge, but who have a brow on which, in lines indelible, are scored a dreary account of the world’s hard dealings with them. Painfully puckered mouths have these, and an air of such sad, sage experience, that one might fancy, not that these were young people who would one day grow to be old women, but rather that, by some inversion of the natural order of things, they had once been old and were growing young again—that they had seen seventy, at least, but had doubled on the brow of the hill of age, instead of crossing it, and retraced their steps, until they arrived back again at thirteen; the old, old heads planted on the young shoulders revealing the secret.

This, the most melancholy type of the grown-up neglected infant, is, however, by no means the most painful of those that come trooping past in such a mighty hurry. Some are dogged and sullen-looking, and appear as though steeped to numbness in the comfortless doctrine, “What can’t be cured must be endured;” as if they had acquired a certain sort of surly relish for the sours of existence, and partook of them as a matter of course, without even a wry face. These are not of the sort that excite our compassion the most; neither are the ailing and sickly-looking little girls, whose tender constitutions have broken down under pressure of the poison inhaled in the crowded workroom, and long hours, and countless trudgings, early and late, in the rain and mire, with no better covering for their shoulders than a flimsy mantle a shower would wet through and through, and a wretched pair of old boots that squelch on the pavement as they walk. Pitiful as are these forlorn ones to behold, there is, at least, a grim satisfaction in knowing that with them it cannot last. The creature who causes us most alarm is a girl of a very different type.

This is the flashy, flaunting “infant,” barely fourteen, and with scarce four feet of stature, but self-possessed and bold-eyed enough to be a “daughter of the regiment”—of a militia regiment even. She consorts with birds of her own feather. Very little experience enables one to tell at a glance almost how these girls are employed, and it is quite evident that the terrible infant in question and her companions are engaged in the manufacture of artificial flowers. Their teeth are discoloured, and there is a chafed and chilblainish appearance about their nostrils, as though suffering under a malady that were best consoled with a pocket-handkerchief. The symptoms in question, however, are caused by the poison used in their work—arsenite of copper, probably, that deadly mineral being of a “lovely green,” and much in favour amongst artificial florists and their customers. Here they come, unabashed by the throng, as though the highway were their home, and all mankind their brothers; she, the heroine with a bold story to tell, and plenty of laughter and free gesticulation as sauce with it. She is of the sort, and, God help them! they may be counted by hundreds in London alone, in whom keen wit would appear to be developed simultaneously with ability to walk and talk. Properly trained, these are the girls that grow to be clever, capable women—women of spirit and courage and shrewd discernment. The worst of it is that the seed implanted will germinate. Hunger cannot starve it to death, or penurious frosts destroy it. Untrained, it grows apace, overturning and strangling all opposition and asserting its paramount importance.

This is the girl who is the bane and curse of the workroom crowded with juvenile stitchers or pasters, or workers in flowers or beads. Her constant assumption of lightheartedness draws them towards her, her lively stories are a relief from the monotonous drudgery they are engaged on. Old and bold in petty wickedness, and with audacious pretensions to acquaintance with vice of a graver sort, she entertains them with stories of “sprees” and “larks” she and her friends have indulged in. She has been to “plays” and to “dancing rooms,” and to the best of her ability and means she demonstrates the latest fashion in her own attire, and wears her draggletail flinders of lace and ribbon in such an easy and old-fashionable manner, poor little wretch, as to impress one with the conviction that she must have been used to this sort of thing since the time of her shortcoating; which must have been many, many years ago. She has money to spend; not much, but sufficient for the purchase of luxuries, the consumption of which inflict cruel pangs on the hungry-eyed beholders. She is a person whose intimacy is worth cultivating, and they do cultivate it, with what result need not be here described.

At fifteen the London factory-bred girl in her vulgar way has the worldly knowledge of the ordinary female of eighteen or twenty. She has her “young man,” and accompanies him of evenings to “sing-songs” and raffles, and on high days and holidays to Hampton by the shilling van, or to Greenwich by the sixpenny boat. At sixteen she wearies of the frivolities of sweethearting, and the young man being agreeable the pair embark in housekeeping, and “settle down.”

Perhaps they marry, and be it distinctly understood, whatever has been said to the contrary, the estate of matrimony amongst her class is not lightly esteemed. On the contrary, it is a contract in which so much pride is taken that the certificate attesting its due performance is not uncommonly displayed on the wall of the living-room as a choice print or picture might be; with this singular and unaccountable distinction that when a clock is reckoned with the other household furniture, the marriage certificate is almost invariably hung under it. It was Mr. Catlin of the Cow Cross Mission who first drew my attention to this strange observance, and in our many explorations into the horrible courts and alleys in the vicinity of his mission-house he frequently pointed out instances of this strange custom; but even he, who is as learned in the habits and customs of all manner of outcasts of civilisation as any man living, was unable to explain its origin. When questioned on the subject the common answer was, “They say that it’s lucky.”

It is the expense attending the process that makes matrimony the exception and not the rule amongst these people. At least this is their invariable excuse. And here, as bearing directly on the question of “neglected infants,” I may make mention of a practice that certain well-intentioned people are adopting with a view to diminishing the prevalent sin of the unmarried sexes herding in their haunts of poverty, and living together as man and wife.

The said practice appears sound enough on the surface. It consists simply in marrying these erring couples gratis. The missionary or scripture reader of the district who, as a rule, is curiously intimate with the family affairs of his flock, calls privately on those young people whose clock, if they have one, ticks to a barren wall, and makes the tempting offer—banns put up, service performed, beadle and pew opener satisfied, and all free! As will not uncommonly happen, if driven into a corner for an excuse, the want of a jacket or a gown “to make a ’spectable ’pearance in” is pleaded; the negociator makes a note of it, and in all probability the difficulty is provided against, and in due course the marriage is consummated.

This is all very well as far as it goes, but to my way of thinking the scheme is open to many grave objections. In the first place the instinct that incites people to herd like cattle in a lair is scarcely the same as induces them to blend their fortunes and live “for better, for worse” till the end of their life. It requires no great depth of affection on the man’s part to lead him to take up with a woman who, in consideration of board and lodging and masculine protection will create some semblance of a home for him. In his selection of such a woman he is not governed by those grave considerations that undoubtedly present themselves to his mind when he meditates wedding himself irrevocably to a mate. Her history, previous to his taking up with her, may be known to him, and though perhaps not all that he could wish, she is as good to him as she promised to be, and they get along pretty well and don’t quarrel very much.

Now, although not one word can be urged in favour of this iniquitous and shocking arrangement, is it quite certain that a great good is achieved by inducing such a couple to tie themselves together in the sacred bonds of matrimony? It is not a marriage of choice as all marriages should be. If the pair had been bent on church marriage and earnestly desired it, it is absurd to suppose that the few necessary shillings, the price of its performance, would have deterred them. If they held the sacred ceremony of so small account as to regard it as well dispensed with as adopted, it is no very great triumph of the cause of religion and morality that the balance is decided by a gown or a jacket, in addition to the good will of the missionary (who, by-the-bye, is generally the distributor of the alms of the charitable) being thrown into the scale.

To be sure the man is not compelled to yield to the persuasions of those who would make of him a creditable member of society; he is not compelled to it, but he can hardly be regarded as a free agent. If the pair have children already, the woman will be only too anxious to second the solicitation of her friend, and so secure to herself legal protection in addition to that that is already secured to her through her mate’s acquired regard for her. Then it is so difficult to combat the simple question, “Why not?” when all is so generously arranged—even to the providing a real gold ring to be worn in place of the common brass make-believe—and nothing remains but to step round to the parish church, where the minister is waiting, and where in a quarter of an hour, the great, and good, and lasting work may be accomplished. The well-meaning missionary asks, “Why not?” The woman, urged by moral or mercenary motives, echoes the momentous query, and both stand with arms presented, in a manner of speaking, to hear the wavering one’s objection. The wavering one is not generally of the far-seeing sort. In his heart he does not care as much as a shilling which way it is. He does not in the least trouble himself from the religious and moral point of view. When his adviser says, “Just consider how much easier your conscience will be if you do this act of justice to the woman whom you have selected as your helpmate,” he wags his head as though admitting it, but having no conscience about the matter he is not very deeply impressed. Nine times out of ten the summing-up of his deliberation is, “I don’t care; it won’t cost me nothing; let ’em have their way.”

But what, probably, is the upshot of the good missionary’s endeavours and triumph? In a very little time the gilt with which the honest adviser glossed the chain that was to bind the man irrevocably to marriage and morality wears off. The sweat of his brow will not keep it bright; it rusts it. He feels, in his own vulgar though expressive language, that he has been “bustled” into a bad bargain. “It is like this ’ere,” a matrimonial victim of the class once confided to me; “I don’t say as she isn’t as good as ever, but I’m blowed if she’s all that better as I was kidded to believe she would be.”

“But if she is as good as ever, she is good enough.”

“Yes, but you haven’t quite got the bearing of what I mean, sir, and I haint got it in me to put it in the words like you would. Good enough before isn’t good enough now, cos it haint hoptional, don’t you see? No, you don’t. Well, look here. S’pose I borrer a barrer. Well, it’s good enough and a conwenient size for laying out my stock on it. It goes pooty easy, and I pays eighteen pence a week for it and I’m satisfied. Well, I goes on all right and without grumbling, till some chap he ses to me, ‘What call have you got to borrer a barrer when you can have one of your own; you alwis want a barrer, don’t you know, why not make this one your own?’ ‘Cos I can’t spare the money,’ I ses. ‘Oh,’ he ses, ‘I’ll find the money and the barrer’s yourn, if so be as you’ll promise and vow to take up with no other barrer, but stick to this one so long as you both shall live.’ Well, as aforesaid, it’s a tidy, useful barrer, and I agrees. But soon as it’s mine, don’t you know, I ain’t quite so careless about it. I overhauls it, in a manner of speaking, and I’m more keerful in trying the balance of it in hand when the load’s on it. Well, maybe I find out what I never before troubled myself to look for. There’s a screw out here and a bolt wanted there. Here it’s weak, and there it’s ugly. I dwells on it in my mind constant. I’ve never got that there barrer out of my head, and p’raps I make too much of the weak pints of it. I gets to mistrust it. ‘It’s all middling right, just now, old woman—old barrer, I mean,’ I ses to myself, ‘but you’ll be a playing me a trick one day, I’m afraid.’ Well, I go on being afraid, which I shouldn’t be if I was only a borrower.”

“But you should not forget that the barrow, to adopt your own ungallant figure of speech, is not accountable for these dreads and suspicions of yours; it will last you as long and as well as though you had continued a borrower; you will admit that, at least!”

“I don’t know. Last, yes! That’s the beggaring part of it. Ah, well! p’raps it’s all right, but I’m blest if I can stand being haunted like I am now.”

Nothing that I could say would add force to the argument of my costermonger friend, as set forth in his parable of the “barrer.” Applying it to the question under discussion, I do not mean to attribute to the deceptiveness of the barrow or to its premature breaking down, the spilling into the gutter of all the unhappy children there discovered. My main reason for admitting the evidence in question was to endeavour to show that as a pet means of improving the morality of our courts and alleys, and consequently of diminishing the gutter population, the modern idea of arresting fornication and concubinage, by dragging the pair there and then to church, and making them man and wife, is open to serious objections. The state of matrimony is not good for such folk. It was never intended for them. It may be as necessary to healthful life as eating is, but no one would think of taking a man starved, and in the last extremity for lack of wholesome aliment, and setting before him a great dish of solid food. It may be good for him by-and-by, but he must be brought along by degrees, and fitted for it. Undoubtedly a great source of our abandoned gutter children may be found in the shocking herding together of the sexes in the vile “slums” and back places of London, and it is to be sincerely hoped that some wise man will presently devise a speedy preventive.

In a recent report made to the Commissioners of Sewers for London, Dr. Letheby says: “I have been at much pains during the last three months to ascertain the precise conditions of the dwellings, the habits, and the diseases of the poor. In this way 2,208 rooms have been most circumstantially inspected, and the general result is that nearly all of them are filthy or overcrowded or imperfectly drained, or badly ventilated, or out of repair. In 1,989 of these rooms, all in fact that are at present inhabited, there are 5,791 inmates, belonging to 1,576 families; and to say nothing of the too frequent occurrence of what may be regarded as a necessitous overcrowding, where the husband, the wife, and young family of four or five children are cramped into a miserably small and ill-conditioned room, there are numerous instances where adults of both sexes, belonging to different families, are lodged in the same room, regardless of all the common decencies of life, and where from three to five adults, men and women, besides a train or two of children, are accustomed to herd together like brute beasts or savages; and where every human instinct of propriety and decency is smothered. Like my predecessor, I have seen grown persons of both sexes sleeping in common with their parents, brothers and sisters, and cousins, and even the casual acquaintance of a day’s tramp, occupying the same bed of filthy rags or straw; a woman suffering in travail, in the midst of males and females of different families that tenant the same room, where birth and death go hand in hand; where the child but newly born, the patient cast down with fever, and the corpse waiting for interment, have no separation from each other, or from the rest of the inmates. Of the many cases to which I have alluded, there are some which have commanded my attention by reason of their unusual depravity—cases in which from three to four adults of both sexes, with many children, were lodging in the same room, and often sleeping in the same bed. I have note of three or four localities, where forty-eight men, seventy-three women, and fifty-nine children are living in thirty-four rooms. In one room there are two men, three women, and five children, and in another one man, four women, and two children; and when, about a fortnight since, I visited the back room on the ground floor of No. 5, I found it occupied by one man, two women, and two children; and in it was the dead body of a poor girl who had died in childbirth a few days before. The body was stretched out on the bare floor, without shroud or coffin. There it lay in the midst of the living, and we may well ask how it can be otherwise than that the human heart should be dead to all the gentler feelings of our nature, when such sights as these are of common occurrence.

“So close and unwholesome is the atmosphere of some of these rooms, that I have endeavoured to ascertain, by chemical means, whether it does not contain some peculiar product of decomposition that gives to it its foul odour and its rare powers of engendering disease. I find it is not only deficient in the due proportion of oxygen, but it contains three times the usual amount of carbonic acid, besides a quantity of aqueous vapour charged with alkaline matter that stinks abominably. This is doubtless the product of putrefaction, and of the various fœtid and stagnant exhalations that pollute the air of the place. In many of my former reports, and in those of my predecessor, your attention has been drawn to this pestilential source of disease, and to the consequence of heaping human beings into such contracted localities; and I again revert to it because of its great importance, not merely that it perpetuates fever and the allied disorders, but because there stalks side by side with this pestilence a yet deadlier presence, blighting the moral existence of a rising population, rendering their hearts hopeless, their acts ruffianly and incestuous, and scattering, while society averts her eye, the retributive seeds of increase for crime, turbulence and pauperism.”

CHAPTER III.
BABY-FARMING.

“Baby-Farmers” and Advertising “Child Adopters.”—“F. X.” of Stepney.—The Author’s Interview with Farmer Oxleek.—The Case of Baby Frederick Wood.

Although it is not possible, in a book of moderate dimensions, such as this, to treat the question of neglected children with that extended care and completeness it undoubtedly deserves, any attempt at its consideration would be glaringly deficient did it not include some reference to the modern and murderous institution known as “baby farming.”

We may rely on it that we are lamentably ignorant both of the gigantic extent and the pernicious working of this mischief. It is only when some loud-crying abuse of the precious system makes itself heard in our criminal courts, and is echoed in the newspapers, or when some adventurous magazine writer in valiant pursuit of his avocation, directs his inquisitive nose in the direction indicated, that the public at large hear anything either of the farmer or the farmed.

A year or so ago a most atrocious child murder attracted towards this ugly subject the bull’s-eye beams of the press, and for some time it was held up and exhibited in all its nauseating nakedness. It may be safely asserted that during the protracted trial of the child murderess, Mrs. Winser, there was not one horrified father or mother in England who did not in terms of severest indignation express his or her opinion of how abominable it was that such scandalous traffic in baby flesh and blood should, through the law’s inefficiency, be rendered possible. But it was only while we, following the revolting revelations, were subject to a succession of shocks and kept in pain, that we were thus virtuous. It was only while our tender feelings were suffering excruciation from the harrowing story of baby torture that we shook in wrath against the torturer. Considering what our sufferings were (and from the manner of our crying out they must have been truly awful) we recovered with a speed little short of miraculous. Barely was the trial of the murderess concluded and the court cleared, than our fierce indignation subsided from its bubbling and boiling, and quickly settled down to calm and ordinary temperature. Nay it is hardly too much to say that our over-wrought sympathies as regards baby neglect and murder fell so cold and flat that little short of a second edition of Herod’s massacre might be required to raise them again.

This is the unhappy fate that attends nearly all our great social grievances. They are overlooked or shyly glanced at and kicked aside for years and years, when suddenly a stray spark ignites their smouldering heaps, and the eager town cooks a splendid supper of horrors at the gaudy conflagration; but having supped full, there ensues a speedy distaste for flame and smoke, and in his heart every one is chiefly anxious that the fire may burn itself out, or that some kind hand will smother it. “We have had enough of it.” That is the phrase. The only interest we ever had in it, which was nothing better than a selfish and theatrical interest, is exhausted. We enjoyed the bonfire amazingly, but we have no idea of tucking back our coat-sleeves and handling a shovel or a pick to explore the unsavoury depth and origin of the flareup, and dig and dam to guard against a repetition of it. It is sufficient for us that we have endured without flinching the sensational horrors dragged to light; let those who dragged them forth bury them again; or kill them; or be killed by them. We have had enough of them.

Great social grievances are not to be taken by storm. They merely bow their vile heads while the wrathful blast passes, and regain their original position immediately afterwards. So it was with this business of baby-farming, and the tremendous outcry raised at the time when the wretch Winser was brought to trial. There are certain newspapers in whose advertisement columns the baby-farmer advertises for “live stock” constantly, and at the time it was observed with great triumph by certain people that since the vile hag’s detection the advertisements in question had grown singularly few and mild. But the hope that the baby-farmer had retired, regarding his occupation as gone, was altogether delusive. He was merely lying quiet for a spell, quite at his ease, making no doubt that business would stir again presently. Somebody else was doing his advertising, that was all. If he had had any reasonable grounds for supposing that the results of the appalling facts brought to light would be that the Legislature would bestir itself and take prompt and efficacious steps towards abolishing him, it would have been different. But he had too much confidence in the sluggardly law to suppose anything of the kind. He knew that the details of the doings of himself and his fellows would presently sicken those who for a time had evinced a relish for them, and that in a short time they would bid investigators and newspapers say no more—they had had enough of it! When his sagacity was verified, he found his way leisurely back to the advertising columns again.

I have spoken of the baby-farmers as masculine, but that was merely for convenience of metaphor. No doubt that the male sex have a considerable interest in the trade, but the negociators, and ostensibly the proprietors, are women. As I write, one of the said newspapers lies before me. It is a daily paper, and its circulation, an extensive one, is essentially amongst the working classes, especially amongst working girls and women.

The words italicised are worthy particular attention as regards this particular part of my subject. Here is a daily newspaper that is mainly an advertising broadsheet. It is an old-established newspaper, and its advertisement columns may be said fairly to reflect the condition of the female labour market over vast tracts of the London district. Column after column tells of the wants of servants and masters. “Cap-hands,” “feather-hands,” “artificial flower-hands,” “chenille-hands,” hands for the manufacture of “chignons” and “hair-nets” and “bead work,” and all manner of “plaiting” and “quilling” and “gauffering” in ribbon and net and muslin, contributing towards the thousand and one articles that stock the “fancy” trade. There are more newspapers than one that aspire as mediums between employers and employed, but this, before all others, is the newspaper, daily conned by thousands of girls and women in search of work of the kind above mentioned, and it is in this newspaper that the baby-farmer fishes wholesale for customers.

I write “wholesale,” and surely it is nothing else. To the uninitiated in this peculiar branch of the world’s wickedness it would seem that, as an article of negociation, a baby would figure rarer than anything, and in their innocence they might be fairly guided to this conclusion on the evidence of their personal experience of the unflinching love of parents, though never so poor, for their children; yet in a single number of this newspaper published every day of the week and all the year round, be it borne in mind, appear no less than eleven separate advertisements, emanating from individuals solicitous for the care, weekly, monthly, yearly—anyhow, of other people’s children, and that on terms odorous of starvation at the least in every meagre figure.

It is evident at a glance that the advertisers seek for customers and expect none other than from among the sorely pinched and poverty-stricken class that specially patronise the newspaper in question. The complexion, tone, and terms of their villanously cheap suggestions for child adoption are most cunningly shaped to meet the possible requirements of some unfortunate work-girl, who, earning while at liberty never more than seven or eight shillings a week, finds herself hampered with an infant for whom no father is forthcoming. There can scarcely be imagined a more terrible encumbrance than a young baby is to a working girl or woman so circumstanced. Very often she has a home before her disaster announced itself—her first home, that is, with her parents—and in her shame and disgrace she abandons it, determined on hiding away where she is unknown, “keeping herself to herself.” She has no other means of earning a livelihood excepting that she has been used to. She is a “cap-hand,” or an “artificial flower-hand,” and such work is always entirely performed at the warehouse immediately under the employer’s eye. What is she to do? She cannot possibly carry her baby with her to the shop and keep it with her the livelong day. Were she inclined so to do, and could somehow contrive to accomplish the double duty of nurse and flower-weaver, it would not be allowed. If she stays at home in the wretched little room she rents with her infant she and it must go hungry. It is a terrible dilemma for a young woman “all but” good, and honestly willing to accept the grievous penalty she must pay if it may be accomplished by the labour of her hands. Small and puny, however, the poor unwelcome little stranger may be, it is a perfect ogre of rapacity on its unhappy mother’s exertions. Now and then an instance of the self-sacrificing devotion exhibited by those unhappy mothers for their fatherless children creeps into print. There was held in the parish of St. Luke’s, last summer, an inquest on the body of a neglected infant, aged seven months. The woman to whose care she was confided had got drunk, and left the poor little thing exposed to the cold, so that it died. The mother paid the drunken nurse four-and-sixpence a week for the child’s keep, and it was proved in evidence that she (the mother) had been earning at her trade of paper-bag making never more than six-and-threepence per week during the previous five months. That was four-and-sixpence for baby and one-and-ninepence for herself.

I don’t think, however, that the regular baby-farmer is a person habitually given to drink. The successful and lucrative prosecution of her business forbids the indulgence. Decidedly not one of the eleven advertisements before mentioned read like the concoctions of persons whose heads were muddled with beer or gin. Here is the first one:—

NURSE CHILD WANTED, OR TO ADOPT.—The Advertiser, a Widow with a little family of her own, and a moderate allowance from her late husband’s friends, would be glad to accept the charge of a young child. Age no object. If sickly would receive a parent’s care. Terms, Fifteen Shillings a month; or would adopt entirely if under two months for the small sum of Twelve pounds.

Women are shrewder than men at understanding these matters, and the advertisement is addressed to women; but I doubt if a man would be far wrong in setting down the “widow lady with a little family of her own,” as one of those monsters in woman’s clothing who go about seeking for babies to devour. Her “moderate allowance,” so artlessly introduced, is intended to convey to the unhappy mother but half resolved to part with her encumbrance, that possibly the widow’s late husband’s friends settle her butcher’s and baker’s bills, and that under such circumstances the widow would actually be that fifteen shillings a month in pocket, for the small trouble of entering the little stranger with her own interesting little flock. And what a well-bred, cheerful, and kindly-behaved little flock it must be, to have no objection to add to its number a young child aged one month or twelve, sick or well! Fancy such an estimable person as the widow lady appraising her parental care at so low a figure as three-and-ninepence a week—sevenpence farthing a day, including Sundays! But, after all, that is not so cheap as the taking the whole and sole charge of a child, sick or well, mind you, to nourish and clothe, and educate it from the age of two months till twelve years, say! To be sure, the widow lady stipulates that the child she is ready to “adopt” must be under two months, and we all know how precarious is infantine existence, and at what a wonderfully low rate the cheap undertakers bury babies in these days.

Another of the precious batch of eleven speaks plainer, and comes to the point without any preliminary walking round it:—

ADOPTION.—A person wishing a lasting and comfortable home for a young child of either sex will find this a good opportunity. Advertisers having no children of their own are about to proceed to America. Premium, Fifteen pounds. Respectable references given and required. Address F. X—.

All that is incomplete in the above is the initials; but one need not ask for the “O” that should come between the “F” and “X.” After perusing the pithy advertisement, I interpreted its meaning simply this:—Any person possessed of a child he is anxious to be rid of, here is a good chance for him. Perhaps “F. X.” is going to America; perhaps he’s not. That is his business. The party having a child to dispose of, need not trouble itself on that score. For “respectable references” read “mutual confidence.” I’ll take the child, and ask no questions of the party, and the party shall fork over the fifteen pounds, and ask no questions of me. That will make matters comfortable for both parties, ’specially if the meeting is at a coffee-house, or at some public building, for if I don’t know the party’s address, of course he can have no fear that I shall turn round on him, and return the child on his hands. The whole affair might be managed while an omnibus is waiting to take up a passenger. A simple matter of handing over a bulky parcel and a little one—the child and the money—and all over, without so much as “good night,” if so be the party is a careful party, and wouldn’t like even his voice heard.

It may be objected that the seduced factory girl is scarcely likely to become the victim of “F. X.,” inasmuch as she never had fifteen pounds to call her own in the whole course of her life, and is less likely than ever to grow so rich now. And that is quite true, but as well as a seduced, there must be a seducer. Not a man of position and means, probably; more likely the fast young son of parents in the butchering, or cheesemongering, or grocery interest—a dashing young blade, whose ideas of “seeing life” is seeking that unwholesome phase of it presented at those unmitigated dens of vice, the “music halls,” at one of which places, probably, the acquaintance terminating so miserably, was commenced. Or, may be, instead of the “young master,” it is the shopman who is the male delinquent; and, in either case, anything is preferable to a “row,” and an exposure. Possibly the embarrassed young mother, by stress of necessity, and imperfect faith in the voluntary goodness of her lover, is driven to make the best of the defensive weapons that chance has thus placed in her hands, and her urging for “some little assistance” becomes troublesome. This being the case, and the devil stepping in with “F. X.’s” advertisement in his hand, the difficulty is immediately reduced to one of raising fifteen pounds. No more hourly anxiety lest “something should turn up” to explode the secret under the very nose of parents or master, no more restrictions from amusements loved so well because of a dread lest that pale-faced baby-carrying young woman should intrude her reproachful presence, and her tears, into their midst. Only one endeavour—a big one, it is true, but still, only one—and the ugly ghost is laid at once and for ever! Perhaps the young fellow has friends of whom he can borrow the money. May be he has a watch, and articles of clothing and jewellery, that will pawn for the amount. If he has neither, still he is not entirely without resources. Music-halls and dancing-rooms cannot be patronised on bare journeyman’s wages, and probably already the till has bled slightly—let it bleed more copiously! And the theft is perpetrated, and “F. X.” releases the guilty pair of the little creature that looks in its helplessness and innocence so little like a bugbear. And it isn’t at all unlikely that, after all, papa regards himself as a fellow deserving of condemnation, perhaps, but entitled to some pity, and, still more, of approval for his self-sacrificing. Another fellow, finding himself in such a fix, would have snapped his fingers in Polly’s face, and told her to do her worst, and be hanged to her; but, confound it all, he was not such a brute as that. Having got the poor girl into trouble, he had done all he could to get her out of it—clean out of it, mind you. Not only had he done all that he could towards this generous end, but considerably more than he ought; he had risked exposure as a thief, and the penalty of the treadmill, and all for her sake! And so thick-skinned is the young fellow’s morality, that possibly he is really not aware of the double-dyed villain he has become; that to strip his case of the specious wrappings in which he would envelop it, he is nothing better than a mean scoundrel who has stooped to till-robbery in order to qualify himself as an accessory to child murder, or worse—the casting of his own offspring, like a mangy dog, on the streets, to die in a gutter, or to live and grow up to be a terror to his kind—a ruffian, and a breeder of ruffians. Nor need it be supposed that this last is a mere fancy sketch. There can be no doubt that if the history of every one of the ten thousand of the young human pariahs that haunt London streets could be inquired into, it would be found that no insignificant percentage of the whole were children abandoned and left to their fate by mock “adopters,” such as “F. X.”

It is these “adopters” of children who should be specially looked after, since, assuming that heartless roguery is the basis of their business dealing, it becomes at once manifest that their main source of profit must lie in their ability to get rid of their hard bargains as soon as possible. From fifteen to five-and-twenty pounds would appear to be the sums usually asked, and having once got possession of the child, every day that the mockery of a bonâ fide bargain is maintained, the value of the blood-money that came with it diminishes. The term “blood-money,” however, should be accepted in a qualified sense. It is quite common for these people to mention as one of the conditions of treaty that a sickly child would not be objected to, and provided it were very sickly, it might in ordinary cases have a fair chance of dying a natural death; but the course commonly pursued by the professional childmonger is not to murder it either by sudden and violent means, or by the less merciful though no less sure process of cold, neglect, and starvation. Not only does death made public (and in these wide-awake times it is not easy to hide a body, though a little one, where it may not speedily be found) attract an amount of attention that were best avoided, but it also entails the expenses of burial. A much easier way of getting rid of a child,—especially if it be of that convenient age when it is able to walk but not to talk, is to convey it to a strange quarter of the town and there abandon it.

And there is something else in connection with this painful phase of the question of neglected children that should not be lost sight of. It must not be supposed that every child abandoned in the streets is discovered by the police and finds its way first to the station-house, and finally to the workhouse. Very many of them, especially if they are pretty-looking and engaging children, are voluntarily adopted by strangers. It might not be unreasonably imagined that this can only be the case when the cruel abandonment takes place in a neighbourhood chiefly inhabited by well-to-do people. And well would it be for the community at large if this supposition were the correct one; then there would be a chance that the poor neglected little waif would be well cared for and preserved against the barbarous injustice of being compelled to fight for his food even before he had shed his milk-teeth. But wonderful as it may seem, it is not in well-to-do quarters that the utterly abandoned child finds protection, but in quarters that are decidedly the worst to do, and that, unfortunately, in every possible respect than any within the city’s limits. The tender consideration of poverty for its kind is a phase of humanity that might be studied both with instruction and profit by those who, through their gold-rimmed spectacles regard deprivation from meat and clothes and the other good things of this world as involving a corresponding deficiency of virtue and generosity. They have grown so accustomed to associate cherubs with chubbiness, and chubbiness with high respectability and rich gravies, that they would, if such a thing were possible, scarcely be seen conversing with an angel of bony and vulgar type. Nevertheless, it is an undoubted fact, that for one child taken from the streets in the highly respectable West-end, and privately housed and taken care of, there might be shown fifty who have found open door and lasting entertainment in the most poverty-stricken haunts of London.

In haunts of vice too, in hideous localities inhabited solely by loose women and thieves. Bad as these people are, they will not deny a hungry child. It is curious the extent to which this lingering of nature’s better part remains with these “bad women.” Love for little children in these poor creatures seems unconquerable. It would appear as though conscious of the extreme depth of degradation to which they have fallen, and of the small amount of sympathy that remains between them and the decent world, they were anxious to hold on yet a little longer, although by so slender a thread as unreasoning childhood affords. As everyone can attest, whose duty it has been to explore even the most notorious sinks of vice and criminality, it is quite common to meet with pretty little children, mere infants of three or four years old, who are the pets and toys of the inhabitants, especially of the women. The frequent answer to the inquiry, “Who does the child belong to?” is, “Oh, he’s anybody’s child,” which sometimes means that it is the offspring of one of the fraternity who has died or is now in prison, but more often that he is a “stray” who is fed and harboured there simply because nobody owns him.

But as may be easily understood, the reign of “pets” of this sort is of limited duration. By the time the curly-headed little boy of four years old grows to be six, he must indeed be an inapt scholar if his two years’ attendance at such a school has not turned his artless simplicity into mischievous cunning, and his “pretty ways” into those that are both audacious and tiresome. Then clubbing takes the place of caressing, and the child is gradually left to shift for himself, and we meet him shortly afterwards an active and intelligent nuisance, snatching his hard-earned crust out of the mire as a crossing sweeper, fusee, or penny-paper selling boy, or else more evilly inclined, he joins other companions and takes up the trade of a whining beggar. Even at that tender age his eyes are opened to the ruinous fact that as much may be got by stealing as by working, and he “tails on,” a promising young beginner, to the army of twenty thousand professional thieves that exact black mail in London.

Supposing it to be true, and for my part I sincerely believe it, that the ranks of neglected children who eventually become thieves, are recruited in great part from the castaways of the mock child adopter, then is solved the puzzle how it is that among a class the origin of almost every member of which can be traced back to the vilest neighbourhood of brutishness and ignorance, so many individuals of more than the average intellect are discovered. Any man who has visited a reformatory for boys must have observed this. Let him go into the juvenile ward or the school-room of a workhouse, either in town or country, and he will find four-fifths of the lads assembled wearing the same heavy stolid look, indicative of the same desperate resignation to the process of learning than which for them could hardly be devised a punishment more severe. But amongst a very large proportion of the boys who have been rescued not merely from the gutter but out of the very jaws of the criminal law, and bestowed in our reformatories, how different is their aspect! Quick-witted, ready of comprehension, bold-eyed, shrewdly-observant, one cannot but feel that it is a thousand pities that such boys should be driven to this harbour of refuge—that so much good manhood material should come so nigh to being wrecked. But how is it that with no more promising nurses than squalor and ignorance the boys of the reformatory should show so much superior to the boys whom a national institution, such as a workhouse is, has adopted, and had all to do with since their infancy? The theory that many of the boys who by rapid steps in crime find their way to a reformatory, are bastard children, for whose safe-keeping the baby farmer was once briefly responsible, goes far towards solving the riddle. The child-adopting fraternity is an extensive one, and finds clients in all grades of society, and there can be little doubt that in instances innumerable, while Alley Jack is paying the penalty of his evil behaviour by turning for his bread on the treadmill, his brothers, made legitimate by the timely reformation and marriage of Alley Jack’s father, are figuring in their proper sphere, and leisurely and profitably developing the intellect they inherit from their brilliant papa. Alley Jack, too, has his share of the family talent—all the brain, all the sensitiveness, all the “blood” of the respectable stock a reckless sprig of which is responsible for Jack’s being. It is only in the nature of things to suppose that Jack’s blood is tainted with the wildness of wicked papa; and here we have in Alley Jack a type of that bold intellectual villain whose clique of fifty or so, as Lord Shaftesbury recently declared, is more to be dreaded than as many hundred of the dull and plodding sort of thief, the story of whose exploits figure daily in the newspapers.

We have, however, a little wandered away from the subject in hand, which is not concerning neglected children who have become thieves, but neglected children, simply, whose future is not as yet ascertained. Speaking of the professional child farmer, it has been already remarked that his sole object, as regards these innocents that are adopted for a sum paid down, is to get rid of them as secretly and quickly as possible. And assuming the preservation of health and life in the little mortal to be of the first importance, there can be no question that he has a better chance of both, even though his treacherous “adopter” deserts him on a doorstep, than if he were so kindly cruel as to tolerate his existence at the “farm.” It is those unfortunate infants who are not “adopted,” but merely housed and fed at so much per week or month, who are the greater sufferers. True, it is to the interest of the practitioners who adopt this branch of baby-farming to keep life in their little charges, since with their death terminates the more or less profitable contract entered into between themselves and the child’s parent or guardian; but no less true is it that it is to the “farmers’” interest and profit to keep down their expenditure in the nursery at as low an ebb as is consistent with the bare existence of its luckless inhabitants. The child is welcome to live on starvation diet just as long as it may. It is very welcome indeed to do so, since the longer it holds out, the larger the number of shillings the ogres that have it in charge will be enabled to grind out of its poor little bones. These are not the “farmers” who append to their advertisements the notification that “children of ill-health are not objected to.” They are by far too good judges for that. What they rejoice in is a fine, robust, healthy-lunged child, with whom some such noble sum as a shilling a day is paid. Such an article is as good as a gift of twenty pounds to them. See the amount of privation such a child can stand before it succumbs! The tenacity of life in children of perfectly sound constitution is proverbial. A ha’p’orth of bread, and a ha’p’orth of milk daily will suffice to keep the machinery of life from coming to a sudden standstill. By such a barely sufficient link will the poor little helpless victim be held to life, while what passes as natural causes attack and gradually consume it, and drag it down to its grave. This, in the baby-farmer’s estimation, is a first-rate article—the pride of the market, and without doubt the most profitable. The safest too. Children will pine. Taken from their mother, it is only to be expected that they should. Therefore, when the poor mother, who is working of nights as well as days, that “nurse’s money” may be punctually paid, visits her little one, and finds it thin and pale and wasting, she is not amazed, although her conscience smites her cruelly, and her heart is fit to break. She is only too thankful to hear “nurse” declare that she is doing all she can for the little darling. It is her only consolation, and she goes away hugging it while “nurse” and her old man make merry over gin bought with that hard, hard-earned extra sixpence that the poor mother has left to buy baby some little comfort.

I trust and hope that what is here set down will not be regarded as mere tinsel and wordy extravagance designed to produce a “sensation” in the mind of the reader. There is no telling into whose hands a book may fall. Maybe, it is not altogether impossible eyes may scan this page that have been recently red with weeping over the terrible secret that will keep but a little longer, and for the inevitable launching of which provision must be made. To such a reader, with all kindliness, I would whisper words of counsel. Think not “twice,” but many times before you adopt the “readiest” means of shirking the awful responsibility you have incurred. Rely on it, you will derive no lasting satisfaction out of this “readiest” way, by which, of course, is meant the way to which the villanous child-farmer reveals an open door. Be righteously courageous, and take any step rather, as you would I am sure if you were permitted to raise a corner and peep behind the curtain that conceals the hidden mysteries of adopted-child murder.

As a volunteer explorer into the depths of social mysteries, once upon a time I made it my business to invade the den of a child-farmer. The result of the experiment was printed in a daily newspaper or magazine at the time, so I will here make but brief allusion to it. I bought the current number of the newspaper more than once here mentioned, and discovering, as usual, a considerable string of child-adopting and nursing advertisements, I replied to the majority of them, professing to have a child “on my hands,” and signing myself “M. D.” My intention being to trap the villains, I need not say that in every case my reply to their preliminary communications was couched in such carefully-considered terms as might throw the most suspicious off their guard. But I found that I had under-estimated the cunning of the enemy. Although the innocent-seeming bait was made as attractive and savoury as possible, at least half of the farmers to whom my epistles were addressed vouchsafed no reply. There was something about it not to their liking, evidently.

Three or four of the hungry pike bit, however, one being a lady signing herself “Y. Z.” In her newspaper advertisement, if I rightly remember, persons whom it concerned were to address, “Y. Z.,” Post Office, — Street, Stepney. “Y. Z.” replying to mine so addressed, said that, as before stated, she was willing to adopt a little girl of weakly constitution at the terms I suggested, her object being chiefly to secure a companion for her own little darling, who had lately, through death, been deprived of his own dear little sister. “Y. Z.” further suggested that I should appoint a place where we could “meet and arrange.”

This, however, was not what I wanted. It was quite evident from the tone of the lady’s note that she was not at all desirous that the meeting should take place at her abode. Again I was to address, “Post Office.” To bring matters to a conclusion, I wrote, declaring that nothing could be done unless I could meet “Y. Z.” at her own abode. No answer was returned to this my last, and it was evidently the intention of “Y. Z.” to let the matter drop.

I was otherwise resolved, however. I had some sort of clue, and was resolved to follow it up. By what subtle arts and contrivance I managed to trace “Y. Z.” from “Post Office” to her abode need not here be recited. Armed with her real name and the number of the street in which she resided, I arrived at the house, and at the door of it just as the postman was rapping to deliver a letter to the very party I had come uninvited to visit. I may say that the house was of the small four or five-roomed order, and no more or less untidy or squalid than is commonly to be found in the back streets of Stepney or Bethnal Green.

“Oxleek” was the original of “Y. Z.,” and of the slatternly, ragged-haired girl who opened the door I asked if that lady was at home. The young woman said that she was out—that she had “gone to the Li-ver.” The young woman spoke with a rapid utterance, and was evidently in a mighty hurry to get back to some business the postman’s knock had summoned her from.

“I beg your pardon, miss, gone to the —”

“Li-ver; where you pays in for young uns’ berryins and that,” she responded; “she ain’t at home, but he is. I’ll call him.”

And so she did. And presently a husky voice from the next floor called out, “Hullo! what is it?”

“Here’s a gentleman wants yer, and here’s a letter as the postman jest left.”

“Ask him if he’s the doctor; I’ve got the young un, I can’t come down,” the husky voice was again heard to exclaim.

To be sure I was not a doctor, not a qualified practitioner that is to say, but as far as the Oxleek family knew me I was “M.D.;” and pacifying my grumbling conscience with this small piece of jesuitism, I blandly nodded my head to the young woman when she recited to me Mr. Oxleek’s query.

“Then you’d better go up, and p’raps you wouldn’t mind taking this letter up with you,” said she.

I went up; it was late in the evening and candlelight, in the room on the next floor that is, but not on the stairs; but had it been altogether dark, I might have discovered Mr. Oxleek by the stench of his tobacco. I walked in at the half-open door.

There was Mr. Oxleek by the fire, the very perfection of an indolent, ease-loving, pipe-smoking, beer-soaking wretch as ever sat for his portrait. He was a man verging on fifty, I should think, with a pair of broad shoulders fit to carry a side of beef, and as greasy about the cuffs and collar of his tattered jacket as though at some early period of his existence he had carried sides of beef. But that must have been many years ago, for the grease had all worn black with age, and the shoulders of the jacket were all fretted through by constant friction against the back of the easy-chair he sat in. He wore slippers—at least, he wore one slipper; the other one, all slouched down at heel, had slipped off his lazy foot a few inches too far for easy recovery, and there it lay. A villanously dirty face had Mr. Oxleek, and a beard of at least a month’s growth. It was plain to be seen that one of Mr. Oxleek’s most favourite positions of sitting was with his head resting against that part of the wall that was by the side of the mantelshelf, for there, large as a dinner plate, was the black greasy patch his dirty hair had made. He had been smoking, for there, still smouldering, was his filthy little pipe on the shelf, and by the side of it a yellow jug all streaked and stained with ancient smears of beer.

He was not quite unoccupied, however; he was nursing a baby! He, the pipe-sucking, beer-swigging, unshaven, dirty, lazy ruffian, was nursing a poor little creature less than a year old, as I should judge, with its small, pinched face reposing against his ragged waistcoat, in the pocket of which his tobacco was probably kept. The baby wore its bedgown, as though it had once been put to bed, and roused to be nursed. It was a very old and woefully begrimed bedgown, bearing marks of Mr. Oxleek’s dirty paws, and of his tobacco dust, and of physic clumsily administered and spilt. It would appear too much like “piling up the agony” did I attempt to describe that baby’s face. It was the countenance of an infant that had cried itself to sleep, and to whom pain was so familiar, that it invaded its dreams, causing its mites of features to twitch and quiver so that it would have been a mercy to wake it.

“Evening, sir; take a cheer!” remarked Mr. Oxleek, quite hospitably; “this is the young un, sir.”

It was very odd. Clearly there was a great mistake somewhere, and yet as far as they had gone, the proceedings were not much at variance with the original text. I was “M.D.,” and a doctor was expected. “This was the young un,” Mr. Oxleek declared, and a young one, a bereaved young one who had lost his darling playmate, was a prominent feature in his wife’s letter to me.

“Oh, is that the young one?” I remarked.

“Yes; a heap of trouble; going after the last, I’m afeard.”

“The same symptoms, eh?”

“Just the same. Reg’ler handful she is, and no mistake.”

This then was not the “young un” Mrs. Oxleek had written about. This was a girl, it seemed.

“Pray, how long is it since a medical man saw the child?” I inquired, I am afraid in a tone that roused suspicion in Mr. Oxleek’s mind.

“Oh, you know, when he came last week—you’re come instead of him? You have come instead of him, haven’t you?”

“No, indeed,” I replied. “I’ve come to talk about that advertisement of yours.”

Mr. Oxleek for a moment looked blank, but only for a moment. He saw the trap just as he was about to set his foot in it, and withdrew in time.

“Not here,” he remarked, impudently.

“But I must beg your pardon, it is here. You forget. I wrote to you as M.D.”

By this time Mr. Oxleek had seized and lit his short pipe, and was puffing away at it with great vigour.

“You’re come to the wrong shop, I tell you,” he replied, from behind the impenetrable cloud; “we don’t know no ‘M.D.’ nor M.P., nor M. anythink; it’s a mistake.”

“Perhaps if I show you your wife’s writing, you will be convinced?”

“No, I shan’t; it’s all a mistake, I tell you.”

I sat down on a chair.

“Will your wife be long before she returns?” I inquired.

“Can’t say—oh, here she comes; now p’raps you’ll believe that you’re come to the wrong shop. My dear, what do we know about M.D.’s, or advertising, eh?”

“Nothing.”

Mrs. Oxleek was a short, fat woman, with a sunny smile on her florid face, and a general air of content about her. She had brought in with her a pot of beer and a quantity of pork sausages for supper.

“Nothing,” she repeated instantly, taking the cue, “who says that we do?”

“This gentleman’s been a tacklin’ me a good ’un, I can tell you!—says that he’s got your writing to show for summat or other.”

“Where is my writing?” asked Mrs. Oxleek, defiantly.

“This is it, if I am not mistaken, ma’am.” And I displayed it.

“Ah! that’s where it is, you see,” said she, with a triumphant chuckle, “you are mistaken. You are only wasting your time, my good sir. My name isn’t ‘Y. Z.,’ and never was. Allow me to light you down-stairs, my good sir.”

And I did allow her. What else could I do? At the same time, and although my investigations led to nothing at all, I came away convinced, as doubtless the reader is, that there was no “mistake,” and that Mr. and Mrs. Oxleek were of the tribe of ogres who fatten on little children.

Singularly enough, as I revise these pages for the press, there appears in the newspapers a grimly apt illustration of the above statement. So exactly do the details of the case in question bear out the arguments used in support of my views of baby-farming, that I will take the liberty of setting the matter before the reader just as it was set before the coroner.

“An investigation of a singular character was held by Mr. Richards on Thursday night, at the Lord Campbell Tavern, Bow, respecting the death of Frederick Wood, aged two years and three months.

“Miss A. W—, of Hoxton, said deceased was a sickly child, and ten months ago witness took it to Mrs. Savill, of 24, Swayton Road, Bow. She paid her four-and-sixpence a week to take care of the child. She never saw more than two other babies at Mrs. Savill’s house. She thought her child was thoroughly attended to. The deceased met with an accident and its thigh was broken, but the doctor said that the witness need not put herself out in the slightest degree, for the child was getting on very well. Witness could not get away from business more than once a week to see the child. She had not seen the child for five weeks.

“Mrs. Caroline Savill said she was the wife of a porter in the city. The deceased had been with her ten months. She put him to bed at nine o’clock on Saturday night, and at half-past eight on Sunday morning she said to her daughter, ‘He looks strange,’ and then she put a looking-glass to his mouth and found that he was dead.

“By the Coroner: She could account for the broken thigh. Last October when she was taking deceased up to bed, she slipped down and fell upon the child. She was quite certain that she was sober. It was a pair of old boots that caused her to slip. She had eleven children to keep at Bow.

“A Juryman: You keep, in fact, a baby-farm?

“Witness: That I must leave to your generosity, gentlemen. In continuation, witness stated that out of the eleven children five had died. There had been no inquest on either of them. The deceased’s bed was an egg-box with some straw in it. The egg-box was a short one, and was sixteen inches wide. The child could not turn in it. She never tied deceased’s legs together. She never discovered that the child’s thigh was broken till the morning following the night when she fell on it. He cried and she put him to bed. She fell upon the edge of the stairs and her weight was on him. She sent for a doctor next day.

“Doctor Atkins said he was called to see the dead body of the deceased last Sunday. The child had a malformed chest. Death had arisen from effusion of serum on the brain from natural causes, and not from neglect. Witness had attended the deceased for the broken thigh. He believed that the bones had not united when death took place.

“The jury, after a long consultation, returned a verdict of ‘death from natural causes;’ and they wished to append a censure, but the coroner refused to record it.”

That is the whole of the pretty story of which the reader must be left to form his own opinion. Should that opinion insist on a censure as one of its appendages, the reader must of course be held personally responsible for it. It is all over now. The poor little victim whom a Miss of his name placed with the Bow “child-farmer,” “by leave of your generosity, gentlemen,” is dead and buried. It would have been a mercy when his unsteady nurse fell on and crushed him on the edge of the stairs, if she had crushed his miserable life out, instead of only breaking a thigh. Since last October, with one small leg literally in the grave, he must have had a dismal time of it, poor little chap, and glad, indeed, must his spirit have been when its clay tenement was lifted out of his coffin cradle—the egg-box with the bit of straw in it—and consigned to the peaceful little wooden house that the cemetery claimed. It is all over with Frederick John Wood; and his mamma, or whoever he was who was at liberty only once a week to come and see him, is released from the crushing burden his maintenance imposed on her, and Mrs. Savill by this time has doubtless filled up the egg-box the little boy’s demise rendered vacant. Why should she not, when she left the coroner’s court without a stain on her character? It is all over. The curtain that was raised just a little has been dropped again, and the audience has dispersed, and nobody will think again of the tragedy the darkened stage is ready to produce again at the shortest notice, until the coroner’s constable rings the bell and the curtain once more ascends.

And so we shall go on, unless the law steps in to our aid. Why does it not do so? It is stringent and vigilant enough as regards inferior animals. It has a stern eye for pigs, and will not permit them to be kept except on certain inflexible conditions. It holds dogs in leash, and permits them to live only as contributors to Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue. It holds its whip over lodging-house keepers, and under frightful pains and penalties they may not swindle a lodger of one out of his several hundred regulation feet of air; but it takes no heed of the cries of its persecuted babes and sucklings. Anyone may start as a professed adopter of children. Anyone however ignorant, and brutal, and given to slipping down stairs, may start as a baby-farmer, with liberty to do as she pleases with the helpless creatures placed in her charge. What she pleases first of all to do, as a matter of course, is to pare down the cost of her charge’s keep, so that she may make a living of the parings. As has been seen, she need not even find them beds to lie on; if she be extra economical, an egg-box with a handful of straw will do as well.

And is there no remedy for this? Would it not be possible, at least, to issue licences to baby-keepers as they are at present issued to cow-keepers? It may appear a brutal way of putting the matter, but it becomes less so when one considers how much at present the brutes have the best of it.

CHAPTER IV.
WORKING BOYS.

The London Errand Boy.—His Drudgery and Privations.—His Temptations.—The London Boy after Dark.—The Amusements provided for him.

The law takes account of but two phases of human existence,—the child irresponsible, and the adult responsible, and overlooks as beneath its dignity the important and well-marked steps that lead from the former state to the latter.

Despite the illegality of the proceeding, it is the intention of the writer hereof to do otherwise, aware as he is, and as every thinking person may be, of how critical and all-important a period in the career of the male human creature, is “boyhood.” Amongst people of means and education, the grave responsibility of seeing their rising progeny safely through the perilous “middle passage” is fully recognized; but it is sadly different with the labouring classes, and the very poor.

It is a lamentable fact that at that period of his existence when he needs closest watching, when he stands in need of healthful guidance, of counsel against temptation, a boy, the son of labouring parents, is left to himself, almost free to follow the dictates of his inclinations, be they good or had. Nothing than this can be more injudicious, and as regards the boy’s moral culture and worldly welfare, more unjust. Not, as I would have it distinctly understood, that the boy of vulgar breeding is by nature more pregnable to temptation than his same age brother of genteel extraction; not because, fairly tested with the latter, he would be the first to succumb to a temptation, but because, poor fellow, outward circumstances press and hamper him so unfairly.

It has recently come to my knowledge that at the present time there is striving hard to attract public attention and patronage an institution styled the “Errand Boys’ Home.” It would be difficult, indeed, to overrate the importance of such an establishment, properly conducted. Amongst neglected children of a larger growth, those of the familiar “errand boy” type figure first and foremost. It would be instructive to learn how many boys of the kind indicated are annually drafted into our great criminal army, and still more so to trace back the swift downhill strides to the original little faltering step that shuffled from the right path to the wrong.

Anyone who has any acquaintance with the habits and customs of the labouring classes, must be aware that the “family” system is for the younger branches, as they grow up, to elbow those just above them in age out into the world; not only to make more room at the dinner-table, but to assist in its substantial adornment. The poorer the family, the earlier the boys are turned out, “to cut their own grass,” as the saying is. Take a case—one in ten thousand—to be met with to-morrow or any day in the city of London. Tom is a little lad—one of seven or eight—his father is a labourer, earning, say, a guinea a week; and from the age of seven Tom has been sent to a penny-a-week school; partly for the sake of what learning he may chance to pick up, but chiefly to keep him “out of the streets,” and to effect a simultaneous saving of his morals and of his shoe-leather. As before stated, Tom’s is essentially a working family. It is Tom’s father’s pride to relate how that he was “turned out” at eight, and had to trudge through the snow to work at six o’clock of winter mornings; and, that though on account of coughs and chilblains and other frivolous and childish ailments, he thought it very hard at the time, he rejoices that he was so put to it, since he has no doubt that it tended to harden him and make him the man he is.

Accordingly, when Tom has reached the ripe age of ten, it is accounted high time that he “got a place,” as did his father before him; and, as there are a hundred ways in London in which a sharp little boy of ten can be made useful, very little difficulty is experienced in Tom’s launching. He becomes an “errand boy,” a newspaper or a printing boy, in all probability. The reader curious as to the employment of juvenile labour, may any morning at six or seven o’clock in the morning witness the hurried trudging to work of as many Toms as the pavement of our great highways will conveniently accommodate, each with his small bundle of food in a little bag, to last him the day through. Something else he may see, too, that would be highly comic were it not for its pitiful side. As need not be repeated here, a boy’s estimate of earthly bliss might be conveniently contained in a dinner-plate of goodly dimensions. When he first goes out to work, his pride and glory is the parcel of food his mother makes up for the day’s consumption. There he has it—breakfast, dinner, tea! Possibly he might get as much, or very nearly, in the ordinary course of events at home, but in a piece-meal and ignoble way. He never in his life possessed such a wealth of food, all his own, to do as he pleases with. Eight—ten slices of bread and butter, and may be—especially if it happen to be Monday—a slice of meat and a lump of cold pudding; relics of that dinner of dinners, Sunday’s dinner!

His, all his, with nobody to say nay; but still only wealth in prospective! It is now barely seven o’clock, and, by fair eating, he will not arrive at that delicious piece of cold pork with the crackling on it until twelve! It is a keen, bracing morning; he has already walked a mile or more; and it wants yet fully an hour and a half to the factory breakfast time. It is just as broad as it is long; suppose he draws on his breakfast allowance just to the extent of one slice? Only one, and that in stern integrity: the topmost slice without fee or favour! But, ah! the cruel fragrance of that juicy cut of spare-rib! It has impregnated the whole contents of the bundle. The crust of that abstracted slice is as savoury, almost, as the crisp-baked rind of the original. Six bites—“too brief for friendship, not for fame”—have consumed it, and left him, alas! hungrier than ever. Shall he? What—taste of the sacred slice? No. It isn’t likely. The pork is for his dinner. But the pudding—that is a supplemental sort of article; a mere extravagance when added to so much perfection as the luscious meat embodies. And out he hauls it; the ponderous abstraction afflicting the hitherto compact parcel with such a shambling looseness, that it is necessary to pause in one of the recesses of the bridge to readjust and tighten it. But, ah! rash boy! Since thou wert not proof against the temptation lurking in that slice of bread-and-butter, but faintly odorous of that maddening flavour, how canst thou hope to save thyself now that thou hast tasted of the pudding to which the pork was wedded in the baker’s oven? It were as safe to trust thee at hungry noon with a luscious apple-dumpling, and bid thee eat of the dough and leave the fruit. It is all over. Reason, discretion, the admonitions of a troubled conscience, were all gulped down with that last corner, crusty bit, so full of gravy. The bridge’s next recess is the scene of another halt, and of an utterly reckless spoliation of the dwindled bundle. And now the pork is consumed, to the veriest atom, and nought remains but four reproachful bread slices, that skulk in a corner, and almost demand the untimely fate visited on their companions. Shall they crave in vain? No. A pretty bundle, this, to take to the factory for his mates to see. A good excuse will serve his purpose better. He will engulf the four slices as he did the rest, and fold up his bag neatly, and hide it in his pocket, and, when dinner-time comes, he will profess that there is something nice at home, and he is going there to partake of it; while, really, he will take a dismal stroll, lamenting his early weakness, and making desperate vows for the future.

It is not, however, with Tom as the lucky owner of a filled food-bag that we have here to deal, but with Tom who at least five days out of the six is packed off to work with just as much bread and butter as his poor mother can spare off the family loaf. Now “going out to work” is a vastly different matter from going from home to school, and innocently playing between whiles. In the first place, the real hard work he has to perform (and few people would readily believe the enormous amount of muscular exertion these little fellows are capable of enduring), develops his appetite for eating to a prodigious extent. He finds the food he brings from home as his daily ration but half sufficient. What are a couple of slices of bread, with perhaps a morsel of cheese, considered as a dinner for a hearty boy who has perhaps trudged from post to pillar a dozen miles or so since his breakfast, carrying loads more or less heavy? He hungers for more, and more is constantly in his sight if he only had the means, a penny or twopence even, to buy it. He makes the acquaintance of other boys; he is drawn towards them in hungry, envious curiosity, seeing them in the enjoyment of what he so yearns after, and they speedily inform him how easy it is to “make” not only a penny or twopence, but a sixpence or a shilling, if he has a mind. And they are quite right, these young counsellors of evil. The facilities for petty pilfering afforded to the shopkeeper’s errand-boy are such as favour momentary evil impulses. He need not engage in subtle plans for the purloining of a shilling or a shilling’s worth. The opportunity is at his fingers’ ends constantly. Usually he has the range of the business premises. Few people mistrust a little boy, and he is left to mind the shop where the money-till is, and he has free access to the store-room or warehouse in which all manner of portable small goods are heaped in profusion. It is an awful temptation. It is not sufficient to urge that it should not be, and that in the case of a lad of well-regulated mind it would not be. It would perhaps be more to the purpose to substitute “well-regulated meals” for “well-regulated minds.” Nine times out of ten the confessions of a discovered juvenile pilferer go to prove that he sinned for his belly’s sake. He has no conscience above his waistband, poor little wretch; nor can much better be expected, when we consider that all his life, his experience and observation has taught him that the first grand aim of human ingenuity and industry is to place a hot baked dinner on the table of Sundays. To be sure, in the case of his hardworking father he may never have known him resort to any other than honest industry; he never found out that his parent was any other than an honest man; and so long as his father or his employer does not find him out to be any other than an honest boy, matters may run smoothly.

It is least of all my intention to make out that every errand-boy is a petty thief; all that I maintain is that he is a human creature just budding into existence as it were in the broad furrowed field of life, and that his susceptibilities are tender, and should be protected from evil influence with even extraordinary care; and that instead of which he is but too often left to grow up as maybe. In their ignorance and hard driving necessity, his parents having given him a spell of penny schooling, and maintained him until he has become a marketable article, persuade themselves that they have done for him the best they can, and nothing remains but for him to obey his master in all things, and he will grow to be as bright a man as his father before him.

It is only necessary to point to the large number of such children, for they are no better, who annually swell our criminal lists, to prove that somewhere a screw is sadly loose, and that the sooner it is set right the better it will be for the nation. The Home for Errand Boys is the best scheme that has as yet been put forth towards meeting the difficulty. Its professed object, I believe, is to afford shelter and wholesome food and healthful and harmless recreation for boys who are virtually without a home, and who have “only a lodging.” That is to say, a place to which they may retire to sleep come bed-time, and for which they pay what appears as a paltry sum when regarded as so many pence per night, but which tells up to a considerable sum by the end of a week.

The most important feature, however, of such a scheme as the Home for Errand Boys embraces, does not appear in the vaunted advantage of reduced cost. Its main attraction is the promise it holds out to provide its lodgers with suitable amusement after work hours and before bed-time. If this were done on an extensive scale, there is no telling how much real substantial good might be accomplished. It is after work hours that boys fall into mischief. There is no reason why these homes should not have existence in various parts of London. One such establishment indeed is of little practical use. If it were possible to establish such places (a careful avoidance of everything savouring of the “asylum” and the “reformatory” would of course be necessary) in half a dozen different spots in the immediate neighbourhood of the city, they would doubtless meet with extensive patronage. They might indeed be made to serve many valuable ends that do not appear at a first glance. If these “homes” were established east, west, north, and south, they might be all under one management, and much good be effected by recommending deserving members for employment. There might even be a provident fund, formed by contributions of a penny or so a week, out of which lads unavoidably out of employ could be supported until a job of work was found for them.

Allusion has, in a previous page, been made to that dangerous time for working boys—the time between leaving work and retiring to bed. It would be bad enough were the boy left to his own devices for squandering his idle time and his hard-earned pence. This task, however, is taken out of his hands. He has only to stroll up this street and down the next, and he will find pitfalls already dug for him; neatly and skilfully dug, and so prettily overspread with cosy carpeting, that they do not in the least appear like pitfalls. It may at first sight seem that “neglected children” are least of all likely to make it worth the while of these diggers of pits, but it should be borne in mind that the term in question is here applied in its most comprehensive sense, that there are children of all ages, and that there are many more ways than one of neglecting children. It is evident that young boys who are out at work from six till six say, and after that spend the evening pretty much how they please, are “neglected” in the most emphatic meaning of the term. Parents are not apt to think so. It is little that they have to concede him in return for his contributions to the common stock, and probably they regard this laxity of supervision as the working boy’s due—as something he has earned, and which is his by right. The boy himself is nothing backward in claiming a privilege he sees accorded to so many other boys, and it is the least troublesome thing in the world for the parents to grant the favour. All that they stipulate for is that the boy shall be home and a-bed in such good time as shall enable him to be up and at work without the loss in the morning of so much as an hour; which is a loss of just as many pence as may happen.

It may not be here out of place to make more definite allusion to the “pitfalls” above-mentioned. Pitfall broadest and deepest is the theatrical exhibition, known as the “penny gaff.” Some considerable time since I wrote on this subject in the columns of the “Morning Star;” and as precisely the old order of things prevails, and the arguments then used against them apply with equal force now, I will, with the reader’s permission, save myself further trouble than that which transcription involves.

Every low district of London has its theatre, or at least an humble substitute for one, called in vulgar parlance a “gaff.” A gaff is a place in which, according to the strict interpretation of the term, stage plays may not be represented. The actors of a drama may not correspond in colloquy, only in pantomime, but the pieces brought out at the “gaff” are seldom of an intricate character, and the not over-fastidious auditory are well content with an exhibition of dumb show and gesture, that even the dullest comprehension may understand. The prices of admission to these modest temples of the tragic muse, are judiciously regulated to the means of the neighbourhood, and range from a penny to threepence. There is no “half-price for children,” and for the simple reason that such an arrangement would reduce the takings exactly fifty per cent. They are all children who support the gaff. Costermonger boys and girls, from eight or nine to fourteen years old, and errand boys and girls employed at factories. As before mentioned, every district has its own “gaff.” There is one near Peter Street, Westminster; a second in the New Cut, at Lambeth; a third in Whitecross Street; a fourth, fifth, and sixth between Whitechapel Church and Ratcliff Highway. It may, without fear of contradiction, be asserted, that within a circuit of five miles of St. Paul’s, at least twenty of these dangerous dens of amusement might be enumerated.

At best of times they are dangerous. The best of times being when current topics of a highly sensational character are lacking, and the enterprising manager is compelled to fall back on some comparatively harmless stock piece. But the “gaff” proprietor has an eye to business, and is a man unlikely to allow what he regards as his chances to slip by him. He at once perceives a chance in the modern mania that pervades the juvenile population for a class of literature commonly known as “highly sensational.” He has no literature to vend, but he does not despair on that account. He is aware that not one in five of the youth who honour his establishment with their patronage can read. If he, the worthy gaff proprietor, had any doubts on the subject, he might settle them any day by listening at his door while an admiring crowd of “regular customers” flocking thereto speculated on the pleasures of the night as foretold in glowing colours on the immense placards that adorn the exterior of his little theatre. They can understand the pictures well enough, but the descriptive legends beneath them are mysteries to which few possess the key. If these few are maliciously reticent, the despair of the benighted ones is painful to witness, as with puckered mouths and knitted brows they essay to decipher the strange straight and crooked characters, and earnestly consult with each other as to when and where they had seen the like. Failing in this, the gaff proprietor may have heard them exclaim in tones of but half-assured consolation, “Ah, well! it doesn’t matter what the reading is; the piece won’t be spoke, it’ll be acted, so we are sure to know all about it when we come to-night.”

Under such circumstances, it is easy enough to understand the agonized anxiety of low-lived ignorant Master Tomkins in these stirring times of Black Highwaymen, and Spring Heel Jacks, and Boy Detectives. In the shop window of the newsvendor round the corner, he sees displayed all in a row, a long line of “penny numbers,” the mere illustrations pertaining to which makes his heart palpitate, and his hair stir beneath his ragged cap. There he sees bold highwaymen busy at every branch of their delightful avocation, stopping a lonely traveller and pressing a pistol barrel to his affrighted head, and bidding him deliver his money or his life; or impeding the way of the mail coach, the captain, hat in hand, courteously robbing the inside passengers (prominent amongst whom is a magnificent female with a low bodice, who evidently is not insensible to the captain’s fascinating manner), while members of his gang are seen in murderous conflict with the coachman and the guard, whose doom is but too surely foreshadowed. Again, here is a spirited woodcut of a booted and spurred highwayman in headlong flight from pursuing Bow Street officers who are close at his heels, and in no way daunted or hurt by the contents of the brace of pistols the fugitive has manifestly just discharged point blank at their heads.

But fairly in the way of the bold rider is a toll-gate, and in a state of wild excitement the toll-gate keeper is seen grasping the long bar that crosses the road. The tormenting question at once arises in the mind of Master Tomkins—is he pushing it or pulling it? Is he friendly to the Black Knight of the Road or is he not? Master T. feels that his hero’s fate is in that toll-gate man’s hands; he doesn’t know if he should vastly admire him or regard him with the deadliest enmity. From the bottom of his heart he hopes that the toll-gate man may be friendly. He would cheerfully give up the only penny he has in his pocket to know that it were so. He would give a penny for a simple “yes” or “no,” and all the while there are eight good letter-press pages along with the picture that would tell him all about it if he only were able to read! There is a scowl on his young face as he reflects on this, and bitterly he thinks of his hardhearted father who sent him out to sell fusees when he should have been at school learning his A B C. Truly, he went for a short time to a Ragged School, but there the master kept all the jolly books to himself—the “Knight of the Road” and that sort of thing, and gave him to learn out of a lot of sober dry rubbish without the least flavour in it. Who says that he is a dunce and won’t learn? Try him now. Buy a few numbers of the “Knight of the Road” and sit down with him, and make him spell out every word of it. Never was boy so anxious after knowledge. He never picked a pocket yet, but such is his present desperate spirit, that if he had the chance of picking the art of reading out of one, just see if he wouldn’t precious soon make himself a scholar?

Thus it is with the neglected boy, blankly illiterate. It need not be supposed, however, that a simple and quiet perusal of the astounding adventures of his gallows heroes from the printed text would completely satisfy the boy with sufficient knowledge to enable him to spell through a “penny number.” It whets his appetite merely. It is one thing to read about the flashing and slashing of steel blades, and of the gleam of pistol barrels, and the whiz of bullets, and of the bold highwayman’s defiant “ha! ha!” as he cracks the skull of the coach-guard, preparatory to robbing the affrighted passengers; but to be satisfactory the marrow and essence of the blood-stirring tragedy can only be conveyed to him in bodily shape. There are many elements of a sanguinary drama that may not well be expressed in words. As, for instance, when Bill Bludjon, after having cut the throat of the gentleman passenger, proceeds to rob his daughter, and finding her in possession of a locket with some grey hair in it, he returns it to her with the observation, “Nay, fair lady, Bill Bludjon may be a thief: in stern defence of self he may occasionally shed blood, but, Perish the Liar who says of him that he respects not the grey hairs of honourable age!” There is not much in this as set down in print. To do Bill justice, you must see how his noble countenance lights as his generous bosom heaves with chivalrous sentiments; how defiantly he scowls, and grinds his indignant teeth as he hisses the word “Liar!”—how piously he turns his eyes heavenward as he alludes to “honourable old age.” It is in these emotional subtleties that the hero rises out of the vulgar robber with his villanous Whitechapel cast of countenance, and his great hands, hideous with murder stains, must be witnessed to be appreciated. It is the gaff proprietor’s high aim and ambition to effect this laudable object, and that he does so with a considerable amount of, at least, pecuniary success, is proved by his “crowded houses” nightly.

Now that the police are to be roused to increased vigilance in the suppression, as well as the arrest of criminality, it would be as well if those in authority directed their especial attention to these penny theatres. As they at present exist, they are nothing better than hot-beds of vice in its vilest forms. Girls and boys of tender age are herded together to witness the splendid achievements of “dashing highwaymen,” and of sirens of the Starlight Sall school; nor is this all. But bad as this is, it is really the least part of the evil. The penny “gaff” is usually a small place, and when a specially atrocious piece produces a corresponding “run,” the “house” is incapable of containing the vast number of boys and girls who nightly flock to see it. Scores would be turned away from the doors, and their halfpence wasted, were it not for the worthy proprietor’s ingenuity. I am now speaking of what I was an actual witness of in the neighbourhood of Shoreditch. Beneath the pit and stage of the theatre was a sort of large kitchen, reached from the end of the passage, that was the entrance to the theatre by a flight of steep stairs. There were no seats in this kitchen, nor furniture of any kind. There was a window looking toward the street, but this was prudently boarded up. At night time all the light allowed in the kitchen proceeded from a feeble and dim gas jet by the wall over the fire-place.

Wretched and dreary-looking as was this underground chamber, it was a source of considerable profit to the proprietor of the “gaff” overhead. As before stated, when anything peculiarly attractive was to be seen, the theatre filled within ten minutes of opening the besieged doors. Not to disappoint the late comers, however, all who pleased might pay and go downstairs until the performance just commenced (it lasted generally about an hour and a half) terminated. The prime inducement held out was, that “then they would be sure of good seats.” The inevitable result of such an arrangement may be easier guessed than described. For my part, I know no more about it than was to be derived from a hasty glance from the stair-head. There was a stench of tobacco smoke, and an uproar of mingled youthful voices—swearing, chaffing, and screaming, in boisterous mirth. This was all that was to be heard, the Babel charitably rendering distinct pronouncing of blasphemy or indecency unintelligible. Nor was it much easier to make out the source from whence the hideous clamour proceeded, for the kitchen was dim as a coal cellar, and was further obscured by the foul tobacco smoke the lads were emitting from their short pipes. A few were romping about—“larking,” as it is termed—but the majority, girls and boys, were squatted on the floor, telling and listening to stories, the quality of which might but too truly be guessed from the sort of applause they elicited. A few—impatient of the frivolity that surrounded them, and really anxious for “the play”—stood apart, gazing with scowling envy up at the ceiling, on the upper side of which, at frequent intervals, there was a furious clatter of hobnailed boots, betokening the delirious delight of the happy audience in full view of Starlight Sall, in “silk tights” and Hessians, dancing a Highland fling. Goaded to desperation, one or two of the tormented ones down in the kitchen reached up with their sticks and beat on the ceiling a tattoo, responsive to the battering of the hobnailed boots before mentioned. This, however, was a breach of “gaff” rule that could not be tolerated. With hurried steps the proprietor approached the kitchen stairs, and descried me. “This ain’t the theeater; you’ve no business here, sir!” said he, in some confusion, as I imagined. “No, my friend, I have no business here, but you have a very pretty business, and one for which, when comes the Great Day of Reckoning, I would rather you answered than me.” But I only thought this; aloud, I made the gaff proprietor an apology, and thankfully got off his abominable premises.

CHAPTER V.
THE PROBLEM OF DELIVERANCE.

Curious Problem.—The Best Method of Treatment.—The “Child of the Gutter” not to be Entirely Abolished.—The Genuine Alley-Bred Arab.—The Poor Lambs of the Ragged Flock.—The Tree of Evil in Our Midst.—The Breeding Places of Disease and Vice.

The curious problem—“What is the best method of treatment to adopt towards improving the condition of neglected children, and to diminish their number for the future?” has been attempted for solution from so many points of attack, and by means so various, that a bare enumeration of the instances would occupy much more space than these limited pages afford.

We may never hope entirely to abolish the child of the gutter. To a large extent, as has been shown, he is a natural growth of vices that seem inseparable from our social system: he is of the world, the flesh, and the devil; and, until we purge our grosser nature, and become angelic, we must tolerate him as we must the result of all our ill-breeding. It is a thousand pities that it should be so, because, as I have endeavoured in these pages to show, the neglected child issuing from the source here hinted at, is by far the most unmanageable and dangerous. Blood is thicker than any water, not excluding ditch water; and the chances are that the unlucky “love-child” will not remain content to grovel in the kennel to which an accident of birth consigned him, but, out of his rebellious nature, conceive a deadly hatred against the world that has served him so shabbily, and do his best to be revenged on it. It is not of the neglected child of this breed that I would say a few concluding words, but of the genuine alley-bred Arab of the City; the worthy descendant of a tribe that has grown so used to neglect that it regards it as its privilege, and fiercely resents any move that may be taken towards its curtailment.

If ever a distressed creature had friends surely this one has. From time immemorial it has been the pet of the philanthropist. Unsavoury, unsightly bantling as it is, he is never tired of fondling it, spending his time and money over it, and holding it up to the commiseration of a humane public, and building all manner of homes and asylums for it; but he still remains on hand. If he would grow up, and after being bound ’prentice to a wholesome trade cease to trouble us, there would be some satisfaction in the business; but it never grows up. It is like the borrowed beggar’s brat, that, in defiance of the progress of time, never emerges from its bedgown, and never grows too big to be tucked under one arm, leaving the other at liberty to arrest the charitable passer-by.

To be sure it is a great consolation to know that despite our non-success, the poor little object of our solicitude is in no danger of being dropped in hopelessness and abandoned, but it would be encouraging to discover that we were making some progress with our main design, which can be nothing less than the complete extinction of children of the “gutter” tribe, such as we are now discussing.

As it is, we are making scarcely any progress at all. I am aware that statistics are against this statement, that the triumphant reports of this and that charity point to a different conclusion. This home has rescued so many little ones from the streets—that asylum can show a thousand decently clad and educated children that but for its efforts would at this moment be either prowling the streets, picking up a more precarious living than the stray dog picks up, or leading the life of a petty thief, and rapidly earning his right to penal servitude.

This, and much more, is doubtless true, but there remains the grim fact that our filthy byways still swarm with these dirty, ragged, disease-stricken little ones, and as plentifully as of yore they infest our highways, an eyesore and a shuddering to all decent beholders. If there has occurred any recent diminution in their number, I should rejoice to know it; but that such is in the least degree the fact, certainly I am not justified in assuming in the face of the urgent appeals daily put forth by the wise in such matters, and who never tire of urging on the benevolently disposed, that never was there such need as now to be up and stirring.

And it can never be otherwise while we limit our charitable doing to providing for those poor lambs of the ragged flock as fast as they are bred, and cast loose on the chance of their being mercifully kidnapped and taken care of. As with indiscriminate giving to beggars, it may be urged that we can never go wrong in ministering to the distress of the infantine and helpless. Opportunities of doing so should perhaps be joyfully hailed by us as affording wholesome exercise of our belief in the Christian religion, but we may rely on it that the supply of the essential ingredient towards the said exercise will never be unequal to the demand. Our charitable exertion flows in too narrow a channel. It is pure, and of depth immeasurable, but it is not broad enough. We have got into a habit of treating our neglected children as an evil unavoidable, and one that must be endured with kindly and pious resignation. We have a gigantic tree of evil rooted in our midst, and our great care is to collect the ripe seeds it drops and provide against their germinating, and we expend as much time and money in the process as judiciously applied would serve to tear up the old tree from its tenacious holding, and for ever destroy its mischievous power. No doubt it may be justly claimed by the patrons and supporters of homes and asylums, that by rescuing these children from the streets they are saved from becoming debased and demoralized as were the parents they sprang from, and so, in course of time, by a steady perseverance in their system, the breed of gutter prowlers must become extinct; but that is a tedious and roundabout method of reform that can only be tolerated until a more direct route is discovered, and one that can scarcely prove satisfactory to those who look forward to a lifetime return for some of their invested capital.

We may depend on it that we shall never make much real progress in our endeavours to check the growth of these seedlings and offshoots of ragged poverty and reckless squalor until we turn our attention with a settled purpose to the haunts they are bred in. Our present system compels us even in its first preliminary steps to do violence against nature. We cannot deal with our babies of the gutter effectually, and with any reasonable chance of success, until we have separated them entirely from their home. We may tame them and teach them to feed out of our hands, and to repeat after us the alphabet, and even words of two and three syllables. We may even induce them to shed their bedraggled feathers and adopt a more decent plumage; but they can never be other than restless and ungovernable, and unclean birds, while they inhabit the vile old parent nest.

It is these vile old nests that should be abolished. While they are permitted to exist, while Rosemary Lane, and Peter Street, Westminster, and Back Church Lane in Whitechapel, and Cow Cross and Seven Dials, and a hundred similar places are tolerated and allowed to flourish, it is utterly impossible to diminish the race of children of the gutter. Why should these breeding places of disease and vice and all manner of abomination be permitted to cumber the earth? There is but one opinion that these horrid dens are the sources from which are derived two-thirds of our neglected ragged urchin population. Further, it is generally conceded, that it is not because of the prevalence of extreme poverty there; the filthy little public-houses invariably to be found lurking in the neighbourhood of rags and squalor would not be so prosperous if such were the case. It is the pestilential atmosphere of the place that will let nothing good live in it. You may never purify it. It is altogether a rotten carcase; and if you stuff it to the mouth with chloride of lime, and whitewash it an inch thick, you will make nothing else of it. It is a sin and a disgrace that human creatures should be permitted to herd in such places. One and all should be abolished, and wholesome habitations built in their stead. Half measures will not meet the case. That has been sufficiently proved but recently, when, not for morality or decency sake, but to make room for a railway, a few score of these odious hole-and-corner “slums” were razed to the ground.

The result was to make bad worse. The wretched occupants of the doomed houses clung to them with as much tenacity as though each abode were an ark, and if they were turned out of it, it would be to drown in the surrounding flood. When the demolishers came with their picks and crows—the honest housebreakers,—and mounted to the roof, the garret lodgers retreated to the next floor, and so on, debating the ground step by step before the inexorable pickaxe, until they were driven into the cellar and could go no lower. Then they had to run for it; but, poor purblind wretches, they had lived so long in dungeon darkness, that the broad light of day was unbearable. Like rats disturbed from a drain, all they desired was to escape out of sight and hide again; and again, like rats, they knew of neighbouring burrows and scuttled to them with all speed.

Ousted from Slusher’s Alley, they sought Grimes’s Rents. Grimes’s Rents were already fully occupied by renters, but the present was a calamity that might overtake anyone, and the desired shelter was not refused. It was a mere matter of packing a little closer. The donkey that lodged in the cellar was turned into the wash-house, and there was a commodious apartment for a large family, and nothing was easier than to rig up an old counterpane on an extended string, so converting one chamber into two. Hard as it is to believe, and in mockery of all our Acts of Parliament for the better ordering of lodging-houses, and our legal enactments regulating the number of cubic feet of air every lodger was entitled to and might insist on, in hundreds of cases this condition of things exists at the present writing. Within a stone’s cast of the Houses of Parliament, where sit six hundred wise gentlemen empanelled to make what laws they please for improving the condition of the people, every one of the said six hundred being an educated man of liberal mind, and fully recognising the Christian maxim that godliness and cleanliness are identical, may be found human creatures housed in places that would ruin the health of a country-bred pig were he removed thereto. In these same places parents and grown up and little children herd in the same room night and day. Sickness does not break up the party, or even the presence of grim Death himself. Singularly enough, however, more ceremony is observed with new life than with old Death. A missionary friend related to me the case of a family of five inhabiting one small room, and the youngest boy, aged thirteen, died. The domestic arrangements, however, were not in the least disturbed by the melancholy event; the lad’s coffin was laid against the wall, and meals were cooked and eaten and the two beds made and occupied as usual until the day of burial. A little while after, however, the mother gave birth to a child, and my friend visiting the family found it grouped on the landing partaking of a rough-and-ready tea. It was voted “undacent to be inthrudin’” until next day. However, the decent scruples of the head of the family did not hold out beyond that time, and by the evening of the next day the old order of things was quite restored.

How in the name of goodness and humanity can we, under such circumstances, hope to be delivered from the curse of neglected children?

II.—Professional Thieves.

CHAPTER VI.
THEIR NUMBER AND THEIR DIFFICULTIES.

Twenty Thousand Thieves in London.—What it Means.—The Language of “Weeds.”—Cleverness of the Pilfering Fraternity.—A Protest Against a Barbarous Suggestion.—The Prisoner’s great Difficulty.—The Moment of Leaving Prison.—Bad Friends.—What Becomes of Good Resolutions and the Chaplain’s Counsel?—The Criminal’s Scepticism of Human Goodness.—Life in “Little Hell.”—The Cow Cross Mission.

The happily ignorant reader, whose knowledge of the criminal classes is confined to an occasional glance through the police court and Sessions cases as narrated in his morning newspaper, will be shocked and amazed to learn that within the limits of the City of London alone, an army of male and female thieves, twenty thousand strong, find daily and nightly employment.

It is easy to write “twenty thousand,” and easier still to read the words. Easier than all to pass them by with but a vague idea of their meaning, and perhaps a sympathetic shrug of the shoulders for the poor, hard-worked policemen who must have such a terrible time of it in keeping such an enormous predatory crew in anything like order. Still, and without the least desire to be “sensational,” I would ask the reader, does he fully comprehend what twenty thousand thieves in London means? Roughly estimating the population of the metropolis as numbering three millions, it means that amongst us one person in every hundred and fifty is a forger, a housebreaker, a pickpocket, a shoplifter, a receiver of stolen goods or what not; a human bird of prey, in short, bound to a desperate pursuit of that terrible course of life into which vice or misfortune originally casts him; a wily, cunning man-wolf, constantly on the watch, seeking whom he may devour.

Almost every member of this formidable host is known to the “police,” but unfortunately this advantage is almost counterbalanced by the fact that the police are as well known to the majority of the twenty thousand. To their experienced eyes, it is not the helmet and the blue coat that makes the policeman. Indeed, they appear to depend not so much on visual evidence as on some subtle power of scent such as the fox possesses in discovering the approach of their natural enemy. They can discover the detective in his innocent-looking smock-frock or bricklayer jacket, while he is yet distant the length of a street. They know him by his step, or by his clumsy affectation of unofficial loutishness. They recognise the stiff neck in the loose neckerchief. They smell “trap,” and are superior to it.

There is a language current amongst them that is to be met with in no dictionary with which I am acquainted. I doubt if even the “slang dictionary” contains more than a few of the following instances that may be accepted as genuine. It will be seen that the prime essential of “thieves’ latin” is brevity. By its use, much may in one or two words be conveyed to a comrade while rapidly passing him in the street, or, should opportunity serve, during a visit to him while in prison.

To erase the original name or number from a stolen watch, and substitute one that is fictitious—christening Jack.

To take the works from one watch, and case them in another—churching Jack.

Poultry stealing—beak hunting.

One who steals from the shopkeeper while pretending to effect an honest purchase—a bouncer.

One who entices another to play at a game at which cheating rules, such as card or skittle sharping—a buttoner.

The treadmill, shin scraper (arising, it may be assumed, on account of the operator’s liability, if he is not careful, to get his shins scraped by the ever-revolving wheel).

To commit burglary—crack a case, or break a drum.

The van that conveys prisoners to gaol—Black Maria.

A thief who robs cabs or carriages by climbing up behind, and cutting the straps that secure the luggage on the roof—a dragsman.

Breaking a square of glass—starring the glaze.

Training young thieves—kidsman.

To be transported or sent to penal servitude—lagged.

Three years’ imprisonment—a stretch.

Half stretch—six months.

Three months’ imprisonment—a tail piece.

To rob a till—pinch a bob.

A confederate in the practice of thimble rigging—a nobbler.

One who assists at a sham street row for the purpose of creating a mob, and promoting robbery from the person—a jolly.

A thief who secretes goods in a shop while a confederate distracts the attention of the shopkeeper is—a palmer.

A person marked for plunder—a plant.

Going out to steal linen in process of drying in gardens—going snowing.

Bad money—sinker.

Passer of counterfeit coins—smasher.

Stolen property generally—swag.

To go about half-naked to excite compassion—on the shallow.

Stealing lead from the roof of houses—flying the blue pigeon.

Coiners of bad money—bit fakers.

Midnight prowlers who rob drunken men—bug hunters.

Entering a dwelling house while the family have gone to church—a dead lurk.

Convicted of thieving—in for a ramp.

A city missionary or scripture reader—gospel grinder.

Shop-lifting—hoisting.

Hidden from the police—in lavender.

Forged bank notes—queer screens.

Whipping while in prison—scroby or claws for breakfast.

Long-fingered thieves expert in emptying ladies’ pockets—fine wirers.

The condemned cell—the salt box.

The prison chaplain—Lady Green.

A boy thief, lithe and thin and daring, such a one as housebreakers hire for the purpose of entering a small window at the rear of a dwelling house—a little snakesman.

So pertinaciously do the inhabitants of criminal colonies stick to their “latin,” that a well-known writer suggests that special religious tracts, suiting their condition, should be printed in the language, as an almost certain method of securing their attention.

There can be no question that that of the professional thief is a bitterly severe and laborious occupation, beset with privations that moral people have no conception of, and involves an amount of mental anxiety and torment that few human beings can withstand through a long lifetime. Some years ago a clergyman with a thorough acquaintance with the subject he was handling, wrote on “Thieves and Thieving,” in the “Cornhill Magazine,” and apropos of this benumbing atmosphere of dread, that constantly encompasses even the old “professional,” he says:—

“But if an acquaintance with the thieves’ quarters revealed to me the amazing subtlety and cleverness of the pilfering fraternity, it also taught me the guilty fear, the wretchedness, the moral guilt, and the fearful hardships that fall to the lot of the professional thief. They are never safe for a moment, and this unceasing jeopardy produces a constant nervousness and fear. Sometimes when visiting the sick, I have gently laid my hand on the shoulder of one of them, who happened to be standing in the street. The man would ‘start like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons,’ and it would take him two or three minutes to recover his self-possession sufficiently to ask me ‘How are you to-day, sir?’ I never saw the adage, ‘Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind,’ so painfully illustrated as in the thieves’ quarter, by the faces of grey-haired criminals, whose hearts had been worn into hardness by the dishonouring chains of transportation. When, in the dusk of the evening, I have spoken to one of them as he stood idly on the public-house steps, I have spoken in a low and altered tone, so that he might not at first recognise me: again the guilty start as the man bent forward, anxiously peering into my face.”

He is never at rest, the wretched professional thief. He goes about with the tools of war perpetually in his hands, and with enemies in the front and the rear, and to the right and the left of him. “Anybody, to hear ’em talk,” a thief once remarked to me (he was a thief at present in possession of liberty; not an incarcerated rogue plying “gammon” as the incarcerated rogue loves to ply it), “anybody would think, to hear ’em talk, that it was all sugar with us while we were free, and that our sufferings did not begin until we were caught, and ‘put away.’ Them that think so know nothing about it. Take a case, now, of a man who is in for getting his living ‘on the cross,’ and who has got a ‘kid’ or two, and their mother, at home. I don’t say that it is my case, but you can take it so if you like. She isn’t a thief. Ask her what she knows about me, and she’ll tell you that, wuss luck, I’ve got in co. with some bad uns, and she wishes that I hadn’t. She wishes that I hadn’t, p’raps—not out of any sort of Goody-two-shoes feeling, but because she loves me. That’s the name of it; we haint got any other word for the feelin’; and she can’t bear to think that I may, any hour, be dragged off for six mouths, or a year, p’raps. And them’s my feelings, too, and no mistake, day after day, and Sundays as well as week-days. She isn’t fonder of me than I am of her, I’ll go bail for that; and as for the kids, the girl especially, why I’d skid a waggon wheel with my body rather than her precious skin should be grazed. Well, take my word for it, I never go out in the morning, and the young ’un sez ‘good bye,’ but what I think ‘good bye—yes! p’raps it’s good bye for a longer spell than you’re dreaming about, you poor little shaver.’ And when I get out into the street, how long am I safe? Why, only for the straight length of that street, as far as I can see the coast clear. I may find a stopper at any turning, or at any corner. And when you do feel the hand on your collar! I’ve often wondered what must be a chap’s feelings when the white cap is pulled over his peepers, and old Calcraft is pawing about his throat, to get the rope right. It must be a sight worse than the other feeling, you’ll say. Well, if it is, I wonder how long the chap manages to hold up till he’s let go!”

I am the more anxious to remark on these lingering relics of humanity, and, I may almost say virtue, that, if properly sought, may be discovered in the most hardened criminals, because, of late, there appears to be a growing inclination to treat the habitual criminal as though he had ceased to be human, and had degenerated into the condition of the meanest and most irreclaimable of predatory animals, fit only to be turned over to the tender mercies of a great body of huntsmen who wear blue coats instead of scarlet, and carry staves and handcuffs in place of whips and horns, and to be pursued to death. I have already taken occasion in the public newspapers, and I have much pleasure in returning to the charge here, to exclaim against the barbarous suggestions of a gentleman holding high position in the police force, Colonel Fraser, Commissioner of the City Police.

Alluding to the Habitual Criminals Bill, Colonel Fraser says:—

“Parts 1 and 2 of the Bill are chiefly designed to ensure a clearer police supervision than now exists over convicts at large on licence, and to extend it to persons who have been, or may be convicted of felony; but all the pains and penalties to which such persons are liable are made to depend absolutely on proof being forthcoming that the alleged offenders are actual licence holders, or convicted felons, and the great difficulty which so frequently occurs in obtaining this proof will present serious obstacles to a satisfactory working of the statute.

“Organized as the English police forces are, it will be most difficult for them, notwithstanding the contemplated system of registration, to account satisfactorily for the movements of licence holders, or to obtain an effective supervision over them, if they are determined to evade it. But the number of these convicts at large is insignificant compared with the swarms of repeatedly-convicted thieves, who give infinitely greater trouble to the police than licence-holders, and who constantly escape with a light sentence, from the impossibility of obtaining ready proof of their former convictions.”

Now comes the remedy for this unsatisfactory state of affairs!

“As a remedy for this, I would suggest that every convict, on being liberated on licence, and every person after a second conviction of felony, should be marked in prison, on being set free, in such manner as the Secretary of State might direct—as has been the practice in the case of deserters, and men dismissed for misconduct from the army: such marking to be accepted as sufficient proof of former convictions.

“The precise mode in which this should be effected is matter of detail; but, by a simple combination of alphabetical letters, similar to that employed in distinguishing postage-stamps, no two persons need bear precisely the same mark, and the arrangement of letters might be such as to show at a glance, not only the particular prison in which the offender had been last confined, but also the date of his last conviction. Copies of these marks, transmitted to the Central Office of Registration in London, would form an invaluable record of the history of habitual criminals, and enable the police to obtain that reliable information as to their antecedents, the want of which now so commonly enables practised offenders to escape the consequences of their misdeeds.

“Attempts might, and probably would, be made to alter the appearance of the tell-tale imprints; but it would be impossible to efface them, and any artificial discoloration of the skin appearing on the particular part of the arm, or body, fixed upon for the prison mark, should be considered as affording sufficient proof of former convictions; unless the person charged could show—to the satisfaction of the justice before whom he might be brought—that it was produced by legitimate means.”

I have ventured to transcribe, in its integrity, the main portion of Colonel Fraser’s “new idea,” thinking that its importance demanded it. It is significant of much that is to be regretted, coming from such a source. It is somewhat excusable, maybe, in a common policeman—who yesterday may have been an agricultural labourer, or a member of a community of which no more in the way of education is expected—if he exhibits a kind of unreasoning, watch-dog antagonism towards the criminal classes. He is instructed in all sorts of manœuvres, and paid a guinea a week to act against them—to oppose the weight of his officially-striped arm, and the full force of his handy staff against them, whenever he finds plausible excuse for doing so. And, possibly, this is a condition of affairs one should not be over eager to reform. The policeman, “too clever by half,” is generally an instrument of injustice, and an impediment in the way of the law’s impartial acting. So long as the common constable remains a well-regulated machine, and fulfils his functions without jarring or unnecessary noise, we will ask no more; but without doubt we expect, and we have a right to expect, some display of intelligence and humanity on the part of the chief engineer who directs and controls these machines. An official of polite education, and possessed of a thorough knowledge of the ways and means and the various resources of the enemy it is his duty to provide against, should be actuated by some more generous sentiment than that which points towards uncompromising extermination. Colonel Fraser should bear in mind that an act of criminality does not altogether change a man’s nature. He is a human creature in which, perhaps through accident, perhaps through desperate, and to some extent deliberate culture, certain growths, injurious to the welfare of the commonwealth, have growth; but to brand, and destroy, and crush under the heel the said creature because of his objectionable affections, is much like smashing a set of valuable vases because stagnant water has been permitted to accumulate in them. It may be urged that if the said vases or men have secreted criminal vice and fouling until their whole substance has become saturated beyond possibility of cleansing, then the sooner they are utterly abolished the better. To this I answer that until the best known methods of cleansing have been tried on the foul vessels we are not in a position to say that they are irreclaimable; and again, even provided that you might discover certain such vessels fit for nothing but destruction, it would be a monstrous absurdity to issue an edict ordering the annihilation of every pot of a like pattern. And this is pretty much as Colonel Fraser would act.

Let the reader for a moment consider what would be the effect if such a law as that proposed by the Commissioner of Police for the City of London were passed. In the first place it would, in its immediate operation, prove immensely unjust to the milder sort of criminal. If we started anew with our army of twenty thousand to-morrow morning, and every member of it had been convicted but once, there would be fairness (admitting just for argument sake only that there is any fairness at all about it) in holding out the threat that the next man who committed himself should be branded. But, as the case stands, before a month had elapsed we should have hundreds of unlucky wretches against whose names but two felonious commitments stood, bearing the hateful brand, while thousands of the old and wary of the tribe acquainted with the interior of every prison in England would, as far as the tell-tale mark is concerned, appear as innocent as you or I. Nor would any “alphabetical postal system,” however ingenious and cold-blooded, avoid this difficulty. The only way of doing full justice to the entire body of felons—the young beginners and the old practitioners—would be, whenever the latter were next taken to search all the prison records for convictions against them, and score them in regular order on the delinquents’ writhing flesh. To do this, however, Colonel Fraser would have to abandon his idea of branding on the arm. That member would in many cases afford inadequate space, even if you brought the chronicle from the shoulder to the finger tips, and “turned over” and continued the length of the criminal’s palm. As the newspaper reports frequently show, there are evil doers whose catalogues of crimes may scarcely be expressed in a century.

But these are the bad ones already so branded and seared in heart and mind that to prick and scorch an inch of their outward skin would be but to tickle their vanity, and give them to brag of another scar, got in their life-long war against society. Short of torturing them or killing them, it matters little what measures are provided against these case-hardened villains. But there are scores and hundreds who though they have earned for themselves the names of criminals, whom to class and force to herd with the before-mentioned set would be to incur the greatest responsibility, and one that under existing circumstances it would be utterly short of wanton brutality to engage in.

As regards the class last mentioned, that is to say, those members who have at present made no very desperate acquaintance with crime and its punishment, I believe that if they were but judiciously dealt with a very large number would be but too glad to escape from their present life of misery. “Many a thief,” says a writer, whose able remarks are the more valuable, because they are founded on actual experience and conversation with the people he treats of; “many a thief is kept in reluctant bondage to crime from the difficulties he finds in obtaining honest employment, and earning honest bread. Many thieves are fond of their criminal calling. They will tell you plainly that they do not intend to work hard for a pound a week, when they can easily earn five times as much by thieving in less time and live like gentlemen. But others of them are utterly weary of the hazard, disgrace, and suffering attaching to their mode of life. Some of them were once pure, honest, and industrious, and when they are sick, or in prison, they are frequently filled with bitter remorse, and make the strongest vows to have done with a guilty life.

“Suppose a man of this sort in prison. His eyes are opened, and he sees before him the gulf of remediless ruin into which he will soon be plunged. He knows well enough that the money earned by thieving goes as fast as it comes, and that there is no prospect of his ever being able to retire on his ill-gotten gains. He comes out of prison, determined to reform. But where is he to go? What is he to do? How is he to live? Whatever may have been done for him in prison, is of little or no avail, if as soon as he leaves the gaol he must go into the world branded with crime, unprotected and unhelped. The discharged prisoner must be friendly with some one, and he must live. His criminal friends will entertain him on the understood condition that they are repaid from the booty of his next depredation. Thus the first food he eats, and the first friendly chat he has, becomes the half necessitating initiative of future crime. Frequently the newly discharged prisoner passes through a round of riot and drunkenness immediately on his release from a long incarceration, as any other man would do in similar circumstances, and who has no fixed principles to sustain him. And so by reason of the rebound of newly acquired liberty, and the influence of the old set, the man is again demoralized. The discharged prisoner leaves gaol with good resolves, but the moment he enters the world, there rises before him the dark and spectral danger of being hunted down by the police, and being recognised and insulted, of being shunned and despised by his fellow workmen, of being everywhere contemned and forsaken.”

There can be no doubt that to this utter want of friends of the right sort at the moment of leaving prison, may be attributed a very large percentage of the persistence in a career of crime by those who have once made a false step. In this respect we treat our criminals of comparatively a mild character with greater harshness and severity than those whose repeated offences have led to their receiving the severest sentences of the law. The convict who is discharged after serving a term of five years at Portland, receives ere he quits the gates of Millbank prison a money gratuity, varying in amount according to the character that was returned with him from the convict establishment. Nor do the chances that are afforded him of quitting his old course of life and becoming an honest man end here. There is the Prisoner’s Aid Society, where he may obtain a little more money and a suit of working clothes, and if he really shows an inclination to reform, he may be even recommended to a situation. Put for the poor wretch who has given society much less offence, who has become a petty thief, probably not from choice, but from hard necessity, and who bitterly repents of his offences, there is no one to take him by the hand and give or lend him so much as an honest half-crown to make a fair start with. It may be said that the convict is most in want of help because he is a convict, because he is a man with whom robberies and violence have become so familiar, that it is needful to provide him with some substantial encouragement lest he slide back into the old groove. Further, because he is a man so plainly branded that the most inexperienced policeman may know at a glance what he is; whereas, the man who has been but once convicted may, if he have the inclination, push his way amongst honest men, and not one of them be the wiser as to the slip he has made. And that would be all very well if he were assisted in rejoining the ranks of honest bread-winners, but what is his plight when the prison door shuts behind him? It was his poverty that urged him to commit the theft that consigned him to gaol, and now he is turned out of it poorer than ever, crushed and spirit-broken, and with all his manliness withered within him. He feels ashamed and disgraced, and for the first few hours of his liberty he would willingly shrink back for hiding, even to his prison, because, as he thinks, people look at him so. A little timely help would save him, but nothing is so likely as desperate “don’t care” to spring out of this consciousness of guilt, and the suspicion of being shunned and avoided; and the army of twenty thousand gains another recruit.

This undoubtedly is frequently the case with the criminal guilty of but a “first offence.” Be he man or lad, however, he will be subject to no such painful embarrassment on his leaving prison after a second or third conviction. By that time he will have made friends. He will have found a companion or two to “work with,” and they will keep careful reckoning of the date of his incarceration as well as of the duration of his term of durance. Make no doubt that they will be on the spot to rejoice with him on his release. They know the exact hour when the prison gate will open and he will come forth, and there they are ready to shake hands with him. Ready to “stand treat.” Ready to provide him with that pipe of tobacco for which he has experienced such frequent longing, and to set before him the foaming pot of beer. “Come along, old pal!” say they, “we thought that you’d be glad of a drink and a bit of bacca, and we’ve got a jolly lot of beef over some baked taters at home!”

What becomes of all his good resolutions—of the chaplain’s wholesome counsel now! “Shut your eyes resolutely to the temptations your old companions may hold out to you,” were the parting words of that good man; “if they threaten you, bid them defiance. Let it be the first test of your good resolves to tell them plainly and boldly that you have done with them and will have no more to do with them!” Most excellent advice truly! but how is the emancipated one to act on it? How can he find it in his heart to dash with cold ingratitude such warmth of generosity and good nature? What claim has he on them that they should treat him so? They owe him nothing, and can have no ulterior and selfish object in thus expending their time and their money on his comfort. All that they expect in return is, that should either of them fall into trouble similar to his, he will exert himself for him in the same manner, and surely that is little enough to ask. Perhaps with the chaplain’s good advice still ringing in his ears, a sigh of lingering remorse is blended with the outpuffing of that first delicious pipe, but it is promptly swallowed down in the draught of free beer, with the grim reflection, perhaps, that if those professing to be his friends came to his timely assistance as promptly and substantially as did those his enemies, he might have been saved the ignominy of entering anew on the old crimeful path.

As I have endeavoured to show, the best time for treating with these unhardened criminals for their reform, is just before they leave the prison at the expiration of their sentence, or so soon as they have crossed its threshold and find themselves free men. But even if they are here missed and allowed to go their sinful way, it is not absolutely necessary to postpone the good work until the law lays hold on them again. The dens to which they retire are not impregnable. They do not live in fortified caves, the doors of which are guarded by savage dogs and by members of the gang armed with swords and pistols. It is wonderful how docile and respectful they will behave towards folk who visit them, treating them as nothing worse than fellow creatures suffering under a great misfortune, and not as savage creatures of prey who have forfeited all claim to human nature, and are fit only to be scourged and branded. A writer already quoted tells us that during two years in one of the largest towns in England he had unlimited access to the thieves’ quarter at all hours and under any circumstances—weddings, midnight gatherings, “benefit nights,” public houses, he has visited them all. “How I gained the confidence of the criminal fraternity I cannot say. I only sought their welfare, never went amongst them without some good errand, never asked questions about their affairs, or meddled with things that did not belong to me; and it is due to the thieves themselves to say that I never received from any of them, whether drunk or sober, an unkind look or a disrespectful word. . . . I had not pursued my quiet mission amongst the thieves many months without discovering the damning fact that they had no faith in the sincerity, honesty, or goodness of human nature; and that this last and vilest scepticism of the human heart was one of the most powerful influences at work in the continuation of crime. They believe people in general to be no better than themselves, and that most people will do a wrong thing if it serves their purpose. They consider themselves better than many “square” (honest) people who practise commercial frauds. Not having a spark of faith in human nature their ease is all but hopeless; and only those who have tried the experiment can tell how difficult it is to make a thief believe that you are really disinterested and mean him well. Nevertheless, the agencies that are at work for the arrest of crime are all more or less working to good purpose, and conducing to a good end. Had I previously known nothing of the zeal and labour that have been expended during the last few years in behalf of the criminal population, I should have learned from my intercourse with the thieves themselves, that a new spirit was getting amongst them, and that something for their good was going on outside thievedom. The thieves, the worst of them, speak gloomily of the prospects of the fraternity; just as a Red Indian would complain of the dwindling of his tribe before the strong march of advancing civilization.”

In every essential particular can I corroborate the above account. There are few worse places in London than certain parts of Cow Cross, especially that part of it anciently known as Jack Ketch’s Warren, or “Little Hell” as the inhabitants more commonly designate it, on account of the number of subjects it produced for the operations of the common hangman. Only that the law is more merciful than of yore, there is little doubt that the vile nests in question, including “Bit Alley,” and “Broad Yard,” and “Frying Pan Alley,” would still make good its claim to the distinguishing title conferred on it. The place indicated swarms with thieves of every degree, from the seven-year old little robber who snatches petty articles from stalls and shop-fronts, to the old and experienced burglar with a wide experience of convict treatment, British and foreign. Yet, accompanied by a city missionary well known to them, I have many a time gone amongst them, feeling as safe as though I was walking along Cheapside. I can give testimony even beyond that of the writer last quoted. “I never asked questions about their affairs, or meddled with things that did not concern me,” says the gentleman in question. I can answer for it that my pastor friend of the Cow Cross Mission was less forbearing. With seasoned, middle-aged scoundrels he seldom had any conversation, but he never lost a chance of tackling young men and lads on the evil of their ways, and to a purpose. Nor was it his soft speech or polished eloquence that prevailed with them. He was by no means a gloomy preacher against crime and its consequences; he had a cheerful hopeful way with him that much better answered the purpose. He went about his Christian work humming snatches of hymns in the liveliest manner. One day while I was with him, we saw skulking along before us a villanous figure, ragged and dirty, and with a pair of shoulders broad enough to carry sacks of coal. “This,” whispered my missionary friend, “is about the very worst character we have. He is as strong as a tiger, and almost as ferocious. “Old Bull” they call him.”

I thought it likely we would pass without recognising so dangerous an animal, but my friend was not so minded. With a hearty slap on his shoulder, the fearless missionary accosted him.

“Well, Old Bull!”

“Ha! ’ow do, Mr. Catlin, sir?”

“As well as I should like to see you, my friend. How are you getting along, Bull?”

“Oh, werry dicky, Mr. Catlin.” And Bull hung his ears and pawed uncomfortably in a puddle, with one slipshod foot, as though in his heart resenting being “pinned” after this fashion.

“You find matters going worse and worse with you, ah!”

“They can’t be no worser than they is, that’s one blessin’!”

“Ah, now there’s where you are mistaken, Bull. They can be worse a thousand times, and they will, unless you turn over a fresh leaf. Why not, Bull? See what a tattered, filthy old leaf the old one is!”

(Bull, with an uneasy glance towards the outlet of the alley, but still speaking with all respect,) “Ah! it’s all that, guv’nor.”

“Well then, since you must begin on a fresh leaf, why not try the right leaf—the honest one, eh, Bull. Just to see how you like it.”

“All right, Mister Catlin. I’ll think about it.”

“I wish to the Lord you would, Bull. There’s not much to laugh at, take my word for that.”

“All right, guv’nor, I ain’t a larfin. I means to be a reg’lar model some day—when I get time. Morning, Mister Catlin, sir.”

And away went “Old Bull,” with a queer sort of grin on his repulsive countenance, evidently no better or worse for the brief encounter with his honest adviser, but very thankful indeed to escape.

“I’ve been up into that man’s room,” said my tough little, cheerful missionary, “and rescued his wife out of his great cruel hands, when three policemen stood on the stairs afraid to advance another step.”

He would do more than in his blunt, rough-and-ready way point out to them what a shameful waste of their lives it was to be skulking in a filthy court all day without the courage to go out and seek their wretched living till the darkness of night. He would offer to find them a job; he made many friends, and was enabled to do so, earnestly exhorting them to try honest work just for a month, to find out what it was like, and the sweets of it. And many have tried it; some as a joke—as a whimsical feat worth engaging in for the privilege of afterwards being able to brag of it, and returned to their old practice in a day or two; others have tried it, and, to their credit be it spoken, stuck to it. In my own mind I feel quite convinced that if such men as Mr. C., of the Cow Cross Mission, who holds the keys not only of the houses in which thieves dwell, but, to a large extent, also, a key to the character and peculiarities of the thieves themselves, were empowered with proper facilities, the amount of good they are capable of performing would very much astonish us.

CHAPTER VII.
HOMES AND HAUNTS OF THE BRITISH THIEF.

The Three Classes of Thieving Society.—Popular Misapprehensions.—A True Picture of the London Thief.—A Fancy Sketch of the “Under-Ground Cellar.”—In Disguise at a Thieves’ Raffle.—The Puzzle of “Black Maria.”—Mr. Mullins’s Speech and his Song.

Although, as most people are aware, the great thief tribe reckons amongst its number an upper, and a middle, and a lower class, pretty much as corresponding grades of station are recognised amongst the honest community, it is doubtful, in the former case, if promotion from one stage to another may be gained by individual enterprise and talent and industry. The literature of the country is from time to time enriched by bragging autobiographies of villains confessed, as well as by the penitent revelations of rogues reclaimed, but, according to my observation, it does not appear that perseverance in the humbler walks of crime lead invariably to the highway of infamous prosperity. It seems to be an idea too preposterous even to introduce into the pages of Newgate romance, daring in their flights of fancy as are the authors affecting that delectable line. We have no sinister antithesis of the well-known honest boy who tramped from Bristol to the metropolis with twopence-halfpenny in his pocket, and afterwards became Lord Mayor of London. No low-browed ragged little thief, who began his career by purloining a halfpenny turnip from a costermonger’s barrow, is immortalized in the page of the Newgate Calendar, as finally arrived at the high distinction of wearing fashionable clothes, and ranking as the first of swell-mobsmen. It is a lamentable fact, and one that should have weight with aspirants for the convict’s mask and badge, that the poor, shabby, hard-working thief so remains, till the end of his days. There is no more chance of his carrying his shameful figure and miserable hang-dog visage into tip-top society of his order, than there is of his attaining the summit of that treadwheel, with the ever-recurring steps of which he is so painfully familiar.

And if there is a forlorn, abject, harassed wretch in the world it is the poor, threadbare, timid London thief. I believe the popular supposition to be that, to turn thief at least ensures for the desperate adventurer money to squander for the time being; that however severe may be the penalty paid for the luxury, while “luck” lasts the picker of pockets and purloiner of his neighbour’s goods has ever at his command means wherewith to satisfy the cravings of his vices, however extravagant they may be—money to live on the fat of the land and get drunk and enjoy happy spells of ease and plenty. This, no doubt, is the tempting picture the devil holds up for the contemplation of heart-sick honesty, when patient integrity is growing faint with hunger and long privation; and truly it seems not an improbable picture. What inducement is there for a man to persist in a career of dishonesty with its certain and frequent penalties of prison and hard labour, unless his perilous avocation ensures him spells, albeit brief ones, of intoxicating enjoyment?

No wonder that the ignorant, sorely-tempted, out-o’-work labourer should take this view of the case, when men, who by station and education—men who profess to have gone out of their highly respectable paths in life to make such inquiries as should qualify them to discuss the matter in solemn Parliamentary conclave, declare that it is so. A curious exhibition of the lamentable credulity of our law makers occurred no longer ago than at the second reading of the Habitual Criminals Bill in the House of Lords. Naturally the subject was one concerning which their Lordships could know nothing, except by hearsay, and Earl Shaftesbury volunteered to put them in possession of such useful information as might guide them towards a decision as regarded the projected Bill.

It is only fair to state, however, that his Lordship was not personally responsible for his startling statements. He had them from a “practitioner,” from a thief, that is to say. His Lordship did not reveal whether it was a thief at large who was his informant: but that is scarcely likely. Doubtless it was from some weeping villain, with an eye to a remission of his sentence, who so frankly confided to the soft-hearted Earl the various secrets of that terrible trade it was his intention never, never to work at again! At any rate, whoever the “practitioner” was, he succeeded in his design completely, as the horror-stricken visage of his lordship, as he delivered himself of the astounding revelations, fully attested.

They were to this effect, and the reader will please bear in mind that they were not tendered to be received at their worth, but as facts which might he relied on. Within the City of London, Lord Shaftesbury declared, “crucibles and melting-pots are kept going all day and all night. I believe that in a very large number of cases the whole of the plate is reduced within two or three hours of the robbery to ingots of silver. As for spoons, forks, and jewellery, they are not taken so readily to the melting-pot; but to well-known places where there is a pipe, similar to that which your lordships may have seen—I hope none may have seen it of necessity—in the shop of the pawnbroker. The thief taps, the pipe is lifted up, and in the course of a minute a hand comes out covered with a glove, takes up the jewellery, and gives out the money for it.”

If that conscienceless “practitioner,” who so scandalously gulled the good Earl, happened to be in enjoyment of liberty when the above quoted newspaper report was printed, how he must have grinned as he perused it? But what an unpleasant reversal of the joke it would be if the mendacious statements of the bare-faced villain lead to the passing of a bill imposing cruelly severe rules for the government of criminals, and the worthy in question should one fine day find himself groaning under the same! The most astounding part of the business however, is, that his lordship should have given credit to such a tissue of fudge. To his honour be it stated, he should know better. As an indefatigable labourer amongst the poor and afflicted, his name will be remembered and blest long after he has passed from among us. It is doubtful if any other man whose title gives him admission to the House of Lords, could have given nearly as much practical information on this painful subject, and there can be no question—and this is the most unfortunate part of the business—that all that his lordship stated was regarded as real. Every lord present to listen to and discuss the various clauses of Lord Kimberley’s Bill, probably took to his vivid imagination the appalling picture of the underground cellars (to be reached only by known members of the burglarious brotherhood who could give the sign to the guardian of the cellar-door), where certain demon-men of the Fagin type presided constantly over crucibles and melting-pots, wherein bubbled and hissed the precious brew of gold and silver ornaments dissolved, the supply being constantly renewed by the bold “cracksmen” who numerously attended to bring the goods to market. Easier still even was it to conjure before the mind’s eye the peculiar operations of the “pipe” that Lord Shaftesbury so graphically described. The deserted-looking house in the gloomy back street, with the street door always ajar so that customers might slip in and out at it in an instant—before even the policeman on beat could wink his sleepy eyes in amazement at the unexpected apparition; with the sliding panel in the dimly-lighted back kitchen, and the “spout” just like a pawnbroker’s, and the “gloved hand,” the fingers of it twitching with eager greed for the gold watch, still warm from the pocket of its rightful owner! How was it possible to deal with a subject bristling so with horrors with calmness and dignity? Their lordships had been given to understand by the mover of the bill that there were fifteen thousand thieves constantly busy in the Metropolis alone, and Lord Shaftesbury had informed them that the mysterious “spout” and the melting-pot were the chief channels for converting stolen goods into ready money. At this rate, London must be almost undermined by these gold-melting cellars—the midnight traveller through the great city might plainly hear and wonder at the strange tap-tapping that met his ears—the tapping at the “spout” that notified to the owner of the gloved hand that a new customer was in attendance? It would have been not very surprising if the Chief Commissioner of Police had been instantly communicated with, and given instructions at once to arrest every man and woman of the fifteen thousand, and hold them in safe keeping until their lordships had resolved on the most efficacious, and at the same time least painful way of exterminating them.

Seriously, it is impossible almost to exaggerate the amount of mischief likely to result from such false and inflammatory pictures of an evil that in its naked self is repulsive enough in all conscience. On the one hand, it excites amongst the people panic and unnecessary alarm, and furnishes the undeniable excuse of “self-defence” for any excess of severity we may be led into; and on the other hand, it tends to magnify the thief’s importance in the eyes of the thief, and to invest his melancholy and everlastingly miserable avocations with precisely the same kind of gallows-glory as is preached by the authors of “Tyburn Dick” or the “Boy Highwayman.” Curiously enough at the conclusion of his long and interesting speech, Lord Shaftesbury went a little out of his way to make mention of the literature of the kind just quoted, to remark on its intimate bearing on the crime of the country, and to intimate that shortly the whole question would be brought under their lordships’ consideration. It is doubtful, however, and I say so with extreme regret, knowing as I well do how shocking even the suspicion of such a thing must be to Lord Shaftesbury, if in any dozen “penny numbers” of the pernicious trash in question, the young aspirant for prison fame would find as much stimulative matter as was provided in his lordship’s speech, or rather speeches, on the Habitual Criminal question.

No, the affairs of those who affect the criminal walks of life are bad enough in all conscience, but they are much less romantic than his lordship has been led to believe. Shorn of the melo-dramatic “bandit” costume with which they have been temporarily invested they lose nothing in appalling effect.

Truly, it is hard to understand, but it is an undoubted fact, that the criminal who in police nomenclature is a “low thief” (to distinguish him, it may be presumed, from “the respectable thief”) is without exception of all men the most comfortless and miserable; and should the reader be so inquisitive as to desire to be informed of the grounds on which I arrive at this conclusion, I beg to assure him that I do not rely on hearsay, neither do I depend on what thieves incarcerated for their offences have told me, holding it to be hardly likely that a prisoner in prison would vaunt his liking for crime and his eagerness to get back to it. I have mixed with thieves at liberty, an unsuspected spy in their camp, more than once. I will quote an example.

This was many years since, and as at the time I published a detailed account of the visit, I may be excused from more than briefly alluding to it here. It was at a thieves’ raffle, held at a public-house in one of the lowest and worst parts of Westminster. I was young in the field of exploration then, and from all that I had heard and read made up my mind for something very terrible and desperate. I pictured to myself a band of rollicking desperadoes, swaggering and insolent, with plenty of money to pay for bottles of brandy and egg-flip unlimited, and plenty of bragging discourse of the doughty deeds of the past, and of their cold-blooded and desperate intentions for the future. Likewise, my expectations of hope and fear included a rich treat in the shape of vocalization. It was one thing to hear play-actors on the stage, in their tame and feeble delineations of the ancient game of “high Toby,” and of the redoubtable doings of the Knights of the Road, spout such soul-thrilling effusions as “Nix my Dolly Pals,” and “Claude Duval,” but what must it be to listen to the same bold staves out of the mouths of real “roaring boys,” some of them, possibly, the descendants of the very heroes who rode “up Holborn Hill in a cart,” and who could not well hear the good words the attendant chaplain was uttering because of the noisy exchange of boisterous “chaff” taking place between the short-pipe smoking driver, whose cart-seat was the doomed man’s coffin, and the gleeful mob that had made holiday to see the fun!

But in all this I was dismally disappointed. I had procured a ticket for the raffle from a friendly police-inspector (goodness only knows how he came possessed of them, but he had quite a collection of similar tickets in his pocket-book), and, disguised for the occasion, I entered the dirty little dram shop, and exhibited my credential to the landlord at the bar. So far the business was promising. The said landlord was as ill-looking a villain as could be desired. He had a broken nose and a wooden leg, both of which deformities were doubtless symptomatic of the furious brawls in which he occasionally engaged with his ugly customers. As I entered he was engaged in low-whispered discourse with three ruffians who might have been brothers of his in a similar way of business, but bankrupt, and gone to the dogs. As I advanced to the bar the four cropped heads laid together in iniquity, separated suddenly, and the landlord affected a look of innocence, and hummed a harmless tune in a way that was quite melodramatic.

I intimated my business, and he replied shortly, “Go on through,” at the same time indicating the back door by a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder. Now for it! On the other side of the back door I discovered a stone yard, at the extremity of which was dimly visible in the darkness a long, low, dilapidated building, with a light shining through the chinks. This, then, was the robber’s den!—a place to which desperate men and women who made robbery and outrage the nightly business of their lives, resorted to squander in riot and debauchery their ill-gotten gains! It would not have surprised me had I found the doorkeeper armed with a pair of “trusty barkers,” and every male guest of the company with a life-preserver sticking out at the breast pocket of his coat.

The door was opened in response to my tap at it. I gave the potman there stationed my ticket, and I entered. I must confess that my first sensation as I cast my eye carelessly around, was one of disgust that I should have been induced to screw up my courage with so much pains for so small an occasion. The building I found myself in was a skittle-ground, furnished with forms and tables; and there were present about thirty persons. As well as I can remember, of this number a third were women, young generally, one or two being mere girls of sixteen, or so. But Jenny Diver was not there, nor Poll Maggot, nor Edgeworth Bess. No lady with ringlets curling over her alabaster shoulders found a seat on the knee of the gallant spark of her choice. No Captain Macheath was to be seen elegantly taking snuff out of a stolen diamond snuff-box, or flinging into the pink satin lap of his lady love a handful of guineas to pay for more brandy. Poor wretches! the female shoulders there assembled spoke rather of bone than alabaster, while the washed-out and mended cotton frocks served in place of pink satin, and hair of most humble fashion surmounted faces by no means expressive either of genuine jollity, or even of a desperate determination towards devil-may-careness, and the drowning of care in the bowl. There were no bowls, even, as in the good old time, only vulgar pewter porter pots, out of which the company thankfully swigged its fourpenny. There was no appearance of hilarity, or joviality even; no more of brag and flourish, or of affectation of ease and freedom, than though every man and woman present were here locked up “on remand,” and any moment might be called out to face that damning piece of kept-back evidence they all along dreaded was in store for them. To be sure it was as yet early in the evening, and though the company may have assembled mainly for the purpose of drowning “dull care,” that malicious imp being but recently immersed, may have been superior at present to their machinations, and able to keep his ugly head above the liquid poured out for his destruction. Or may be, again, being a very powerful “dull care,” of sturdy and mature growth, he might be able to hold out through many hours against the weak and watery elements brought to oppose him.

Anyhow, so far as I was able to observe, there was no foreshadowing of the blue and brooding imp’s defeat. His baneful wings seemed spread from one end of the skittle-alley to the other, and to embrace even the chairman, who being a Jew, and merely a receiver of stolen goods, might reasonably have been supposed to be less susceptible than the rest. There would seem to prevail, amongst a large and innocent section of the community, a belief that the thief is a creature distinguished no less by appearance than by character from the honest host he thrives by. I have heard it remarked more than once, by persons whose curiosity has led them to a criminal court when a trial of more than ordinary interest is proceeding, that really this prisoner or that did not look like a thief, or a forger, or stabber, as the case might be. “Lord bless us,” I once heard an elderly lady exclaim, in the case of an oft-convicted scoundrel of the “swell mob” tribe, over whose affecting trial she had shed many tears, “Lord bless us!” said she, as the jury found him guilty, and sentenced him to two years’ hard labour, “so thin, and genteel, and with spectacles on, too! I declare I should have passed that young man twenty times without dreaming of calling out for the police.” On the other hand, there are very many persons less ingenuous than the old lady, who invariably regard a man through the atmosphere of crime, real or supposed, that envelopes him, and by means of its distorting influence make out such a villain as satisfies their sagacity. Had one of this last order been favoured with a private view of the company assembled to assist at Mr. Mullins’s raffle, and have been previously informed that they were one and all thieves, in all probability they would have appeared thieves; but I am convinced that had they been shown to an unprepared and unprejudiced observer, his opinion would have been that the company gathered in the skittle-alley of the “Curly Badger” were no worse than a poor set of out-o’-work tailors, or French polishers, or weavers, or of some other craft, the members of which affect the gentility that black clothes and a tall hat is supposed to confer on the wearer; nor would an hour in their society, such as I spent, have sufficed to dissipate the innocent impression. Their expenditure was of the most modest sort, not one man in six venturing beyond the pot of beer. Their conversation, though not the most elegant, was least of all concerning the wretched trade they followed; indeed, the subject was never mentioned at all, except in melancholy allusion to Peter or Jerry, who had been recently “copped” (taken), and was expected to pass “a tail piece in the steel” (three months in prison). There was one observation solemnly addressed by one elderly man to another elderly man, the purport of which at the time puzzled me not a little. “Unlucky! Well you may say it. Black Maria is the only one that’s doin’ a trade now. Every journey full as a tuppenny omblibus!” I listened intently as prudence would permit for further reference to the mysterious female who was doing “all the trade,” and “every journey” was “as full as a twopenny omnibus,” but nothing in the conversation transpired tending to throw a light on the dark lady; so I mentally made a note of it for reference to my friend the inspector. He laughed. “Well, she has been doing a brisk stroke of business of late, I must say,” said he. “Black Maria, sir, is our van of that colour that carries ’em off to serve their time.”

But, as before observed, there was nothing in the demeanour of either the men or women present at Mullins’s raffle to denote either that they revelled in the nefarious trade they followed, or that they derived even ordinary comfort and satisfaction from it. To be sure, it may have happened that the specimens of the thief class assembled before me were not of the briskest, but taking them as they were, and bearing in mind the spiritless, hang-dog, mean, and shabby set they were, the notion of bringing to bear on them such tremendous engines of repression as that suggested by the humane Commissioner of the City Police appears nothing short of ridiculous.

At the same time, I would have it plainly understood that my pity for the thief of this class by no means induces me to advise that no more effective means than those which at present exist should be adopted for his abolition. A people’s respect for the laws of the country is its chief pillar of strength, and those who have no respect for the laws, act as so many rats undermining the said pillar, and although the rats assembled at Mullins’s raffle were not of a very formidable breed, their hatred of the law, and their malicious defiance of it, was unmistakeable. For instance, the article to be raffled was a silk pocket handkerchief, and there it was duly displayed hanging across a beam at the end of the skittle-ground. The occasion of the raffle was, that Mr. Mullins had just been released after four months’ imprisonment, and that during his compulsory absence from home matters had gone very bad, and none the less so because poor Mrs. Mullins was suffering from consumption. In alluding to these sad details of his misfortune, Mr. Mullins, in returning thanks for the charity bestowed on him, looked the picture of melancholy. “Whether she means ever to get on her legs again is more than I can say,” said he, wagging his short-cropped head dolefully, “there ain’t much chance, I reckon, when you’re discharged from Brompton incurable. Yes, my friends, it’s all agin me lately, and my luck’s regler out. But there’s one thing I must mention” (and here he lifted his head with cheerful satisfaction beaming in his eyes), “and I’m sure you as doesn’t know it will be very glad to hear it—the handkerchief wot’s put up to raffle here is the wery identical one that I was put away for.” And judging from the hearty applause that followed this announcement, there can be no doubt that Mr. Mullins’s audience were very glad indeed to hear it.

But even after this stimulant, the spirits of the company did not rally anything to speak of. Song singing was started, but nobody sung “Nix my Dolly Pals,” or “Claude Duval.” Nobody raised a roaring chant in honour of “ruby wine,” or the flowing bowl, or even of the more humble, though no less genial, foaming can. There was a comic song or two, but the ditties in favour were those that had a deeply sentimental or even a funereal smack about them. The gentleman who had enlightened me as to Black Maria sang the Sexton, the chorus to which lively stave, “I’ll provide you such a lodging as you never had before,” was taken up with much heartiness by all present. Mullins himself, who possessed a fair alto voice, slightly damaged perhaps by a four months’ sojourn in the bleak atmosphere of Cold Bath Fields, sang “My Pretty Jane,” and a very odd sight it was to observe that dogged, jail-stamped countenance of his set, as accurately as Mullins could set it, to an expression matching the bewitching simplicity of the words of the song. I was glad to observe that his endeavours were appreciated and an encore demanded.

Decidedly the songs, taken as a whole, that the thieves sang that evening in the Skittle Saloon of the “Curly Badger” were much less objectionable than those that may be heard any evening at any of our London music halls, and everything was quiet and orderly. Of course I cannot say to what extent this may have been due to certain rules and regulations enforced by the determined looking gentleman who served behind the bar. There was one thing, however, that he could not enforce, and that was the kindliness that had induced them to meet together that evening. I had before heard, as everybody has, of “honour amongst thieves,” but I must confess that I had never suspected that compassion and charity were amongst the links that bound them together; and when I heard the statement from the chair of the amount subscribed (the “raffle” was a matter of form, and the silk handkerchief a mere delicate concealment of the free gift of shillings), when I heard the amount and looked round and reckoned how much a head that might amount to, and further, when I made observation of the pinched and poverty-stricken aspect of the owners of the said heads, I am ashamed almost to confess that if within the next few days I had caught an investigating hand in my coat-tail pockets, I should scarcely have had the heart to resist.

CHAPTER VIII.
JUVENILE THIEVES.

The Beginning of the Downhill Journey.—Candidates for Newgate Honours.—Black Spots of London.—Life from the Young Robber’s Point of View.—The Seedling Recruits the most difficult to reform.—A doleful Summing-up.—A Phase of the Criminal Question left unnoticed.—Budding Burglars.—Streams which keep at full flood the Black Sea of Crime.—The Promoters of “Gallows Literature.”—Another Shot at a Fortress of the Devil.—“Poison-Literature.”—“Starlight Sall.”—“Panther Bill.”

It is quite true that, counting prostitutes and receivers of stolen goods, there are twenty thousand individuals eating the daily bread of dishonesty within the city of London alone; there are many more than these. And the worst part of the business is, that those that are omitted from the batch form the most painful and repulsive feature of the complete picture. Shocking enough is it to contemplate the white-haired, tottering criminal holding on to the front of the dock because he dare not trust entirely his quaking legs, and with no more to urge in his defence than Fagin had when it came to the last—“an old man, my lord, a very old man;” and we give him our pity ungrudgingly because we are no longer troubled with fears for his hostility as regards the present or the future. It is all over with him or very nearly. The grave yawns for him and we cannot help feeling that after all he has hurt himself much more than he has hurt us, and when we reflect on the awful account he will presently be called on to answer, our animosity shrinks aside, and we would recommend him to mercy if it were possible. No, it is not those who have run the length of their tether of crime that we have to fear, but those who by reason of their tender age are as yet but feeble toddlers on the road that leads to the hulks. It would be instructive as well as of great service if reliable information could be obtained as to the beginning of the down-hill journey by our juvenile criminals. Without doubt it would be found that in a lamentably large number of cases the beginning did not rest in the present possessors at all, but that they were bred and nurtured in it, inheriting it from their parents as certain forms of physical disease are inherited.

In very few instances are they trained to thieving by a father who possibly has gone through all the various phases of criminal punishment, from the simple local oakum shed and treadmill to the far-away stone quarry and mineral mine, and so knows all about it. The said human wolf and enemy of all law and social harmony, his progenitor, does not take his firstborn on his knee as soon as he exhibits symptoms of knowing right from wrong, and do his best to instil into his young mind what as a candidate for Newgate honours the first principles of his life should be.

This would be bad enough, but what really happens is worse. To train one’s own child to paths of rectitude it is necessary to make him aware of the existence of paths of iniquity and wrong, that when inadvertently he approaches the latter, he may recognise and shun them. So on the other hand, if by the devil’s agency a child is to be made bold and confident in the wrong road, the right must be exhibited to him in a light so ridiculous as to make it altogether distasteful to him. Still a comparison is instituted, and matters may so come about that one day he may be brought to re-consider the judiciousness of his choice and perhaps to reverse his previous decision. But if he has received no teaching at all; if in the benighted den in which he is born, and in which his childish intellect dawns, no ray of right and truth ever penetrates, and he grows into the use of his limbs and as much brains as his brutish breeding affords him, and with no other occupation before him than to follow in the footsteps of his father the thief—how much more hopeless is his case?

Does the reader ask, are there such cases? I can answer him in sorrowful confidence, that in London alone they may be reckoned in thousands. In parts of Spitalfields, in Flower and Dean Street, and in Kent Street, and many other streets that might be enumerated, they are the terror of small shopkeepers, and in Cow Cross, with its horrible chinks in the wall that do duty for the entrance of courts and alleys—Bit Alley, Frying Pan Alley, Turk’s Head-court, and Broad Yard, they swarm like mites in rotten cheese. As a rule, the police seldom make the acquaintance of this thievish small fry (if they did, the estimated number of London robbers would be considerably augmented); but occasionally, just as a sprat will make its appearance along with a haul of mackerel, one reads in the police reports of “Timothy Mullins, a very small boy, whose head scarcely reached the bar of the dock;” or of “John Smith, a child of such tender age that the worthy magistrate appeared greatly shocked,” charged with some one of the hundred acts of petty pilfering by means of which the poor little wretches contrive to stave off the pangs of hunger. Where is the use of reasoning with Master Mullins on his evil propensities? The one propensity of his existence is that of the dog—to provide against certain gnawing pains in his belly. If he has another propensity, it is to run away out of dread for consequences, which is dog-like too. All the argument you can array against this little human waif with one idea, will fail to convince him of his guilt; he has his private and deeply-rooted opinion on the matter, you may depend, and if he screws his fists into his eyes, and does his earnest best to make them water—if when in the magisterial presence he contorts his countenance in affected agony, it is merely because he perceives from his worship’s tone that he wishes to agonize him, and is shrewd enough to know that to “give in best,” as he would express it, is the way to get let off easy.

But supposing that he were not overawed by the magisterial presence, and felt free to speak what is foremost in his mind unreservedly as he would speak it to one of his own set. Then he would say, “It is all very fine for you to sit there, you that have not only had a jolly good breakfast, but can afford to sport a silver toothpick to pick your teeth with afterwards, it is all very fine for you to preach to me that I never shall do any good, but one of these days come to something that’s precious bad, if I don’t cut the ways of thieving, and take to honest ways. There’s so many different kinds of honest ways. Yours is a good ’un. I ain’t such a fool as not to know that it’s better to walk in honest ways like them you’ve got into, and to wear gold chains and velvet waistcoats, than to prowl about in ragged corduroys, and dodge the pleeseman, and be a prig: but how am I to get into them sorts of honest ways? Will you give me a hist up to ’em? Will you give me a leg-up—I’m such a little cove, you see—on to the bottom round of the ladder that leads up to ’em? If it ain’t in your line to do so, p’raps you could recommend me to a lady or gentleman that would? No! Then, however am I to get into honest ways? Shall I make a start for ’em soon as I leaves this ere p’lice office, from which you are so werry kind as to discharge me? Shall I let the chances of stealing a turnip off a stall, or a loaf out of a baker’s barrow, go past me, while I keep straight on, looking out for a honest way?—straight on, and straight on, till I gets the hungry staggers (you never had the hungry staggers, Mr. Magistrate), and tumble down on the road? I am not such a fool, thank’e. I don’t see the pull of it. I can do better in dishonest ways. I’m much obliged to YOU. I’m sure of a crust, though a hard ’un, while I stick to the latter, and if I break down, you’ll take care of me for a spell, and fatten me up a bit; but s’pose I go on the hunt after them honest ways you was just now preaching about, and I miss ’em, what am I then? A casual pauper, half starved on a pint of skilly, or ‘a shocking case of destitution,’ and the leading character in a coroner’s inquest!” All this Master Timothy Mullins might urge, and beyond favouring him with an extra month for contempt of court, what could the magistrate do or say?

Swelling the ranks of juvenile thieves we find in large numbers the thief-born. Writing on this subject, a reverend gentleman of wisdom and experience says, “Some are thieves from infancy. Their parents are thieves in most cases; in others, the children are orphans, or have been forsaken by their parents, and in such cases the children generally fall into the hands of the professional thief-trainer. In every low criminal neighbourhood there are numbers of children who never knew their parents, and who are fed and clothed by the old thieves, and made to earn their wages by dishonest practices. When the parent thieves are imprisoned or transported, their children are left to shift for themselves, and so fall into the hands of the thief-trainer. Here, then, is one great source of crime. These children are nurtured in it. They come under no good moral influence; and until the ragged-schools were started, they had no idea of honesty, not to mention morality and religion. Sharpened by hunger, intimidated by severe treatment, and rendered adroit by vigilant training, this class of thieves is perhaps the most numerous, the most daring, the cleverest, and the most difficult to reform. In a moral point of view, these savages are much worse off than the savages of the wilderness, inasmuch as all the advantages of civilization are made to serve their criminal habits. The poor, helpless little children literally grow up into a criminal career, and have no means of knowing that they are wrong; they cannot help themselves, and have strong claims on the compassion of every lover of his species.”

Truly enough these seedling recruits of the criminal population are the most difficult to reform. They are impregnable alike to persuasion and threatening. They have an ingrain conviction that it is you who are wrong, not them. That you are wrong in the first place in appropriating all the good things the world affords, leaving none for them but what they steal; and in the next place, they regard all your endeavours to persuade them to abandon the wretched life of a thief for the equally poor though more creditable existence of the honest lad, as humbug and selfishness. “No good feeling is ever allowed to predominate; all their passions are distorted, all their faculties are perverted. They believe the clergy are all hypocrites, the judges and magistrates tyrants, and honest people their bitterest enemies. Believing these things sincerely, and believing nothing else, their hand is against every man, and the more they are imprisoned the more is their dishonesty strengthened.”

This is, indeed, a doleful summing up of our present position and future prospects as regards so large a percentage of those we build prisons for. It is somewhat difficult to avoid a feeling of exasperation when, as an honest man, and one who finds it at times a sore pinch to pay rates and taxes, one contemplates the ugly, hopeless picture. Still, we should never forget that these are creatures who are criminal not by their own seeking. They are as they were born and bred and nurtured, and the only way of relieving society of the pest they are against it, is to take all the care we may to guard against the ravages of those we have amongst us, and adopt measures for the prevention of their breeding a new generation.

How this may be accomplished is for legislators to decide. Hitherto it has appeared as a phase of the criminal question that has attracted very little attention on the part of our law makers. They appear, however, to be waking up to its importance at last. Recently, in the House of Lords, Lord Romilly suggested that the experiment might be tried of taking away from the home of iniquity they were reared in the children of twice or thrice convicted thieves above the age of ten years; taking them away for good and all and placing them under State protection; educating them, and giving them a trade. If I rightly recollect, his lordship’s suggestion did not meet with a particularly hearty reception. Some of his hearers were of opinion that it was setting a premium on crime, by affording the habitual thief just that amount of domestic relief he in his selfishness would be most desirous of. But Lord Romilly combated this objection with the reasonable rejoinder, that by mere occupation the nature of the thief was not abased below that of the brute, and that it was fair to assume that so far from encouraging him to qualify himself for State patronage, his dread of having his children taken from him might even check him in his iniquitous career.

One thing, at least, is certain; it would come much cheaper to the country if these budding burglars and pickpockets were caught up, and caged away from the community at large, before their natures became too thoroughly pickled in the brine of rascality. Boy thieves are the most mischievous and wasteful. They will mount a house roof, and for the sake of appropriating the half-a-crown’s worth of lead that forms its gutter, cause such damage as only a builder’s bill of twenty pounds or so will set right. The other day a boy stole a family Bible valued at fifty shillings, and after wrenching off the gilt clasps, threw the book into a sewer; the clasps he sold to a marine store dealer for twopence halfpenny! It may be fairly assumed that in the case of boy thieves, who are so completely in the hands of others, that before they can “make” ten shillings in cash, they must as a rule steal to the value of at least four pounds, and sometimes double that sum. But let us put the loss by exchange at its lowest, and say that he gets a fourth of the value of what he steals, before he can earn eighteenpence a day, he must rob to the amount of two guineas a week—a hundred and nine pounds a year! Whatever less sum it costs the State to educate and clothe and teach him, the nation would be in pocket.

It would be idle to attempt to trace back to its origin the incentive to crime in the class of small criminals here treated of. Innocent of the meaning of the term “strict integrity,” they are altogether unconscious of offending against it. They may never repent, for they can feel no remorse for having followed the dictates of their nature. No possible good can arise from piecing and patching with creditable stuff the old cloak of sin they were clothed in at their birth, and have worn ever since, till it has become a second skin to them. ‘Before they can be of any real service as members of an honest community, they must be reformed in the strictest sense of the term. Their tainted morality must he laid bare to the very bones, as it were, and its rotten foundation made good from its deepest layer. The arduousness of this task it is hard to overrate; nothing, indeed, can be harder, except it be to weed out from an adult criminal the tough and gnarled roots of sin that grip and clasp about and strangle his better nature. And this should be the child criminal reformer’s comfort and encouragement.

It must not be imagined, however, that the growth of juvenile criminality is altogether confined to those regions where it is indigenous to the soil; were it so, our prospects of relief would appear much more hopeful than at present, for, as before stated, all that is necessary would be to sow the baleful ground with the saving salt of sound and wholesome teaching, and the ugly vegetation would cease.

But there are other and more formidable sources from which flow the tributary streams that feed and keep at full flood our black sea of crime; more formidable, because they do not take the shape of irrepressible springs that make for the surface, simply because they are impelled thereto by forces they have not the strength to combat against, but rather of well planned artificial aqueducts and channels, and on the development of which much of intellect is expended. It is much harder to deal with the boy who, well knowing right from wrong, chooses the latter, than with the boy who from the beginning has been wrong from not knowing what right is.

Moreover, the boy who has been taught right from wrong, the boy who has been sent to school and knows how to read, has this advantage over his poor brother of the gutter—an advantage that tells with inexpressible severity against the community at large; he has trainers who, discovering his weakness, make it their profit and business to take him by the hand and bring him along in that path of life to which his dishonest inclination has called him.

I allude to those low-minded, nasty fellows, the proprietors and promoters of what may be truthfully described as “gallows literature.” As a curse of London, this one is worthy of a special niche in the temple of infamy, and to rank first and foremost. The great difficulty would be to find a sculptor of such surpassing skill as to be able to pourtray in one carved stone face all the hideous vices and passions that should properly belong to it. It is a stale subject, I am aware. In my humble way, I have hammered at it both in newspapers and magazines, and many better men have done the same. Therefore it is stale. For no other reason. The iniquity in itself is as vigorous and hearty as ever, and every week renews its brimstone leaves (meanwhile rooting deeper and deeper in the soil that nourishes it), but unfortunately it comes under the category of evils, the exposure of which the public “have had enough of.” It is very provoking, and not a little disheartening, that it should be so. Perhaps this complaint may be met by the answer: The public are not tired of this one amongst the many abuses that afflict its soul’s health, it is only tired of being reminded of it. Explorers in fields less difficult have better fortune. As, for instance, the fortunate discoverer of a gold field is. Everybody would be glad to shake him by the hand—the hand that had felt and lifted the weight of the nuggets and the yellow chips of dust; nay, not a few would be willing to trim his finger nails, on the chance of their discovering beneath enough of the auriferous deposit to pay them for their trouble. But, to be sure, in a city of splendid commercial enterprise such as is ours, it can scarcely be expected that that amount of honour would be conferred on the man who would remove a plague from its midst as on the one whose magnificent genius tended to fatten the money-bags in the Bank cellars.

At the risk, however, of being stigmatized as a man with a weakness for butting against stone walls, I cannot let this opportunity slip, or refrain from firing yet once again my small pop-gun against this fortress of the devil. The reader may have heard enough of the abomination to suit his taste, and let him rest assured that the writer has written more than enough to suit his; but if every man set up his “taste” as the goal and summit of his striving, any tall fellow a tip-toe might, after all, see over the heads of most of us. The main difficulty is that the tens and hundreds of thousands of boys who stint a penny from its more legitimate use to purchase a dole of the pernicious trash in question, have not “had enough of it.” Nothing can be worse than this, except it is that the purveyors of letter-press offal have not had enough of it either, but, grown prosperous and muscular on the good feeding their monstrous profits have ensured them, they are continually opening up fresh ground, each patch fouler and more pestilent than the last.

At the present writing I have before me half-a-dozen of these penny weekly numbers of “thrilling romance,” addressed to boys, and circulated entirely among them—and girls. It was by no means because the number of these poison pen’orths on sale is small that a greater variety was not procured. A year or so since, wishing to write a letter on the subject to a daily newspaper, I fished out of one little newsvendor’s shop, situated in the nice convenient neighbourhood of Clerkenwell, which, more than any other quarter of the metropolis, is crowded with working children of both sexes, the considerable number of twenty-three samples of this gallows literature. But if I had not before suspected it, my experience on that occasion convinced me that to buy more than a third of that number would be a sheer waste of pence. To be sure, to expect honest dealing on the part of such fellows as can dabble in “property” of the kind in question, is in the last degree absurd, but one would think that they would, for “business” reasons, maintain some show of giving a pen’orth for a penny. Such is not the case, however. In three instances in my twenty-three numbers, I found the self-same story published twice under a different title, while for at least half the remainder the variance from their brethren is so very slight that nobody but a close reader would discover it.

The six-pen’orth before me include, “The Skeleton Band,” “Tyburn Dick,” “The Black Knight of the Road,” “Dick Turpin,” “The Boy Burglar,” and “Starlight Sall.” If I am asked, is the poison each of these papers contains so cunningly disguised and mixed with harmless-seeming ingredients, that a boy of shrewd intelligence and decent mind might be betrayed by its insidious seductiveness? I reply, no. The only subtlety employed in the precious composition is that which is employed in preserving it from offending the blunt nostrils of the law to such a degree as shall compel its interference. If it is again inquired, do I, though unwillingly, acknowledge that the artful ones, by a wonderful exercise of tact and ingenuity, place the law in such a fix that it would not be justified in interfering? I most distinctly reply, that I acknowledge nothing of the kind; but that, on the contrary, I wonder very much at the clumsiness of a legislative machine that can let so much scoundrelism slip through its cogs and snares.

The daring lengths these open encouragers of boy highwaymen and Tyburn Dicks will occasionally go to serve their villanous ends is amazing. It is not more than two or three years since, that a prosperous member of the gang, whose business premises were in, or within a few doors of Fleet Street, by way of giving a fair start to his published account of some thief and murderer, publicly advertised that the buyers of certain numbers would be entitled to a chance of a Prize in a grand distribution of daggers. Specimens of the deadly weapons (made, it may be assumed, after the same fashion as that one with which “flash Jack,” in the romance, pinned the police officer in the small of his back) were exhibited in the publisher’s shop window, and in due course found their way into the hands of silly boys, with minds well primed for “daring exploits,” by reading “numbers 2 and 3 given away with number 1.”

It is altogether a mistake, however, to suppose that the poison publisher’s main element of success consists in his glorification of robbers and cut-throats. To be sure he can by no means afford to dispense with the ingredients mentioned in the concoction of his vile brew, but his first and foremost reliance is on lewdness. Everything is subservient to this. He will picture to his youthful readers a hero of the highway, so ferocious in his nature, and so reckless of bloodshed, that he has earned among his comrades the flattering nick-name of “the Panther.” He will reveal the bold panther in all his glory, cleaving the skull of the obstinate old gentleman in his travelling carriage, who will not give up his money, or setting an old woman on the kitchen fire, as a just punishment for hiding her guineas in the oven, in fishing them out of which the panther burns his fingers; he will exhibit the crafty “panther” wriggling his way through the floor boards of his cell, into a sewer beneath, and through which he is to make his escape to the river, and then by a flourish of his magic pen, he will convey the “panther” to the “boudoir” of Starlight Sall, and show you how weak a quality valour is in the presence of “those twin queens of the earth,” youth and beauty! The brave panther, when he has once crossed the threshold of that splendid damsel (who, by the way, is a thief, and addicted to drinking brandy by the “bumper”) is, vulgarly speaking, “nowhere.” The haughty curl of his lip, the glance of his eagle eye, “the graceful contour of his manly form,” a mere gesture of which is sufficient to quell rising mutiny amongst his savage crew, all fall flat and impotent before the queenly majesty of Sall. But there is no fear that the reader will lose his faith in Panther Bill, because of this weakness confessed. As drawn by the Author (does the pestiferous rascal so style himself, I wonder?) Starlight Sall is a creature of such exquisite loveliness, that Jupiter himself might have knelt before her. She is such a matchless combination of perfection, that it is found necessary to describe her charms separately, and at such length that the catalogue of the whole extends through at least six pages.

It is in this branch of his devilish business that the author of “Starlight Sall” excels. It is evident that the man’s mind is in his work, and he lingers over it with a loving hand. Never was there such a tender anatomist. He begins Sall’s head, and revels in her auburn tresses, that “in silken, snaky locks wanton o’er her shoulders, white as eastern ivory.” He is not profound in foreheads, and hers he passes over as “chaste as snow,” or in noses, Sall’s being described briefly as “finely chiselled;” but he is well up in the language of eyes—the bad language. He skirmishes playfully about those of Sall, and discourses of her eyebrows as “ebon brow,” from which she launches her excruciating shafts of love. He takes her by the eye-lashes, and describes them as the “golden fringe that screens the gates of paradise,” and finally he dips into Sall’s eyes, swimming with luscious languor, and pregnant with tender inviting to Panther Bill, who was consuming in ardent affection, as “the rippling waves of the bright blue sea to the sturdy swimmer.” It is impossible here to repeat what else is said of the eyes of Starlight Sall, or her teeth, “like rich pearls,” or of her “pouting coral lips, in which a thousand tiny imps of love are lurking.” Bear it in mind that this work of ours is designed for the perusal of thinking men and women; that it is not intended as an amusing work, but as an endeavour to pourtray to Londoners the curses of London in a plain and unvarnished way, in hope that they may be stirred to some sort of absolution from them. As need not be remarked, it would be altogether impossible to the essayer of such a task, if he were either squeamish or fastidious in the handling of the material at his disposal; but I dare not follow our author any further in his description of the personal beauties of Starlight Sall. Were I to do so, it would be the fate of this book to be flung into the fire, and every decent man who met me would regard himself justified in kicking or cursing me; and yet, good fathers and mothers of England—and yet, elder brothers and grown sisters, tons of this bird-lime of the pit is vended in London every day of the Christian year.

Which of us can say that his children are safe from the contamination? Boys well-bred, as well as ill-bred, are mightily inquisitive about such matters, and the chances are very clear, sir, that if the said bird-lime were of a sort not more pernicious than that which sticks to the fingers, we might at this very moment find the hands of my little Tom and your little Jack besmeared with it. Granted, that it is unlikely, that it is in the last degree improbable, even; still, the remotest of probabilities have before now shown themselves grim actualities, and just consider for a moment the twinge of horror that would seize on either of us were it to so happen! Let us for a moment picture to ourselves our fright and bewilderment, if we discovered that our little boys were feasting off this deadly fruit in the secrecy of their chambers! Would it then appear to us that it was a subject the discussion of which we had “had enough of”? Should we be content, then, to shrug our shoulders after the old style, and exclaim impatiently against the barbarous taste of writers who were so tiresomely meddlesome? Not likely. The pretty consternation that would ensue on the appalling discovery!—the ransacking of boxes and cupboards, to make quite sure that no dreg of the poison, in the shape of an odd page or so, were hidden away!—the painful examination of the culprit, who never till now dreamt of the enormity of the thing he had been doing!—the reviling and threatening that would be directed against the unscrupulous news-agent who had supplied the pernicious pen’orth! Good heavens! the tremendous rumpus there would be! But, thank God, there is no fear of that happening.

Is there not? What are the assured grounds of safety? Is it because it stands to reason that all such coarse and vulgar trash finds its level amongst the coarse and vulgar, and could gain no footing above its own elevation? It may so stand in reason, but unfortunately it is the unreasonable fact that this same pen poison finds customers at heights above its natural low and foul water-line almost inconceivable. How otherwise is it accountable that at least a quarter of a million of these penny numbers are sold weekly? How is it that in quiet suburban neighbourhoods, far removed from the stews of London, and the pernicious atmosphere they engender; in serene and peaceful semi-country towns where genteel boarding schools flourish, there may almost invariably be found some small shopkeeper who accommodatingly receives consignments of “Blue-skin,” and the “Mysteries of London,” and unobtrusively supplies his well-dressed little customer with these full-flavoured articles? Granted, my dear sir, that your young Jack, or my twelve years old Robert, have minds too pure either to seek out or crave after literature of the sort in question, but not unfrequently it is found without seeking. It is a contagious disease, just as cholera and typhus and the plague are contagious, and, as everybody is aware, it needs not personal contact with a body stricken to convey either of these frightful maladies to the hale and hearty. A tainted scrap of rag has been known to spread plague and death through an entire village, just as a stray leaf of “Panther Bill,” or “‘Tyburn Tree” may sow the seeds of immorality amongst as many boys as a town can produce.

CHAPTER IX.
THE THIEF NON-PROFESSIONAL.

The Registered and the Unregistered Thieves of the London Hunting-ground.—The Certainty of the Crop of Vice.—Omnibus Drivers and Conductors.—The “Watchers.”—The London General Omnibus Company.—The Scandal of their System.—The Shopkeeper Thief.—False Weights and Measures.—Adulteration of Food and Drink.—Our Old Law, “I am as honest as I can afford to be!”—Rudimentary Exercises in the Art of Pillage.

There are unregistered as well “registered” thieves. How many of the former make London their hunting-ground, it were much more difficult to enumerate. Nor is it so much out of place as might at first appear, to class both phases of rascality under one general heading. We have to consider the sources from which are derived our army of London thieves. It is not as though the plague of them that afflicts was like other plagues, and showed itself mild or virulent, according to well-defined and ascertained provocatives. On the contrary, the crop of our crime-fields is even more undeviating than our wheat or barley crops. A grain of corn cast into the ground may fail, but the seeds of vice implanted in kindly soil is bound to germinate, unless the nature of the soil itself is altered. As already stated, the number of our London thieves has somewhat decreased of late years, but it is merely to the extent of six or seven per cent. If it is twenty thousand at the present time, this day twelvemonths, allowing for the increased population, it will be nineteen thousand, say.

Appalling as are the criminal returns for the city of London, it would be a vain delusion to imagine that when the “twenty thousand” have passed in review before us, the whole of the hideous picture has been revealed. The Government statistics deal only with “professional criminals;” that class of persons, that is to say, who have abandoned all idea of living honestly, and who, weighing the probable consequences, resign themselves to a life of systematic depredation, and study existing facilities, and likely new inventions, just as the ingenious joiner or engineer does in an honest way.

The all-important question being, what are the main sources from which are derived with such steadiness and certainty, recruits for the great criminal army, it would be as well to inquire how much of dishonesty is permitted amongst us unchecked, simply because it does not take precisely that shape and colour it must assume before it so offends us that we insist on the law’s interference. It should perhaps tend to make us more tender in our dealings with thieves denounced as such, and convicted, and sent to prison, when we consider the thousands of men of all grades who know honesty by name only, and who would at the merest push of adversity slip off the straight path on which for years past they have been no better than barefaced impostors and trespassers, and plunge at once into the miry ways of the professed thieves. It ceases to be a wonder how constantly vacancies in the ranks of crime are filled when we reflect on the flimsy partition that screens so many seemingly honest men, and the accidental rending of which would disclose a thief long practised, and cool, and bold through impunity. There are whole communities of men, constituting complete branches of our social economy, on whom the taint of dishonesty rests, and their masters are fully aware of it, and yet year after year they are allowed to continue in the same employment. Nay, I think that I may go as far as to assert that so complete is the disbelief in the honesty of their servants by these masters, that to the best of their ability they provide against loss by theft by paying the said servants very little wages. A notable instance of this is furnished by the omnibus conductors in the service of the General Omnibus Company. It is not because the company in question conducts its business more loosely than other proprietors of these vehicles that I particularize it, but because it is a public company in the enjoyment of many privileges and monopolies, and the public have an undoubted right to expect fair treatment from it. I don’t know how many omnibuses, each requiring a conductor, are constantly running through the streets of London, but their number must be very considerable, judging from the fact that the takings of the London General Omnibus Company alone range from nine to ten thousand pounds weekly. Now it is well known to the company that their conductors rob them. A gentleman of my acquaintance once submitted to the secretary of the company an ingenious invention for registering the number of passengers an omnibus carried on each journey, but the secretary was unable to entertain it. “It is of no use to us, sir,” said he. “The machine we want is one that will make our men honest, and that I am afraid is one we are not likely to meet with. They will rob us, and we can’t help ourselves.” And knowing this, the company pay the conductor four shillings a day, the said day, as a rule, consisting of seventeen hours—from eight one morning till one the next. The driver, in consideration it may be assumed of his being removed from the temptation of handling the company’s money, is paid six shillings a day, but his opinion of the advantage the conductor still has over him may be gathered from the fact that he expects the latter to pay for any reasonable quantity of malt or spirituous liquor he may consume in the course of a long scorching hot or freezing cold day, not to mention a cigar or two and the invariable parting glass when the cruelly long day’s work is at an end.

It would likewise appear that by virtue of this arrangement between the omnibus conductor and his employers, the interference of the law, even in cases of detected fraud, is dispensed with. It is understood that the London General Omnibus Company support quite a large staff of men and women watchers, who spend their time in riding about in omnibuses, and noting the number of passengers carried on a particular journey, with the view of comparing the returns with the conductor’s receipts. It must, therefore, happen that the detections of fraud are numerous; but does the reader recollect ever reading in the police reports of a conductor being prosecuted for robbery?

To be sure the Company may claim the right of conducting their business in the way they think best as regards the interests of the shareholders, but if that “best way” involves the countenancing of theft on the part of their servants, which can mean nothing else than the encouragement of thieves, it becomes a grave question whether the interests of its shareholders should be allowed to stand before the interests of society at large. It may be that to prosecute a dishonest conductor is only to add to the pecuniary loss he has already inflicted on the Company, but the question that much more nearly concerns the public is, what becomes of him when suddenly and in disgrace they turn him from their doors? No one will employ him. In a few weeks his ill-gotten savings are exhausted, and he, the man who for months or years, perhaps, has been accustomed to treat himself generously, finds himself without a sixpence, and, what is worse, with a mark against his character so black and broad that his chances of obtaining employment in the same capacity are altogether too remote for calculation. The respectable barber who declined to shave a coal-heaver on the ground that he was too vulgar a subject to come under the delicate operations of the shaver’s razor, and who was reminded by the grimy one that he had just before shaved a baker, justified his conduct on the plea that his professional dignity compelled him to draw a line somewhere, and that he drew it at bakers. Just so the London General Omnibus Company. They draw the line at thieves rash and foolish. So long as a servant of theirs is content to prey on their property with enough of discretion as to render exposure unnecessary, he may continue their servant; but they make it a rule never again to employ a man who has been so careless as to be found out.

As has been shown, it is difficult to imagine a more satisfactory existence than that of an omnibus conductor to a man lost to all sense of honesty; on the other hand it is just as difficult to imagine a man so completely “floored” as the same cad disgraced, and out of employ. It is easy to see on what small inducements such a man may be won over to the criminal ranks. He has no moral scruples to overcome. His larcenous hand has been in the pocket of his master almost every hour of the day for months, perhaps years past. He is not penitent, and if he were and made an avowal to that effect, he would be answered by the incredulous jeers and sneers of all who knew him. The best that he desires is to meet with as easy a method of obtaining pounds as when he cheerfully drudged for eighteen hours for a wage of four-shillings. This being the summit of his ambition, presently he stumbles on what appears even an easier way of making money than the old way, and he unscrupulously appears not in a new character, but in that he has had long experience in, but without the mask.

I should wish it to be distinctly understood, that I do not include all omnibus conductors in this sweeping condemnation. That there are honest ones amongst them I make no doubt; at the same time I have no hesitation in repeating that in the majority of cases it is expected of them that they will behave dishonestly, and they have no disinclination to discredit the expectation. I believe too, that it is much more difficult for a man to be honest as a servant of the company than if he were in the employ of a “small master.” It is next to impossible for a man of integrity to join and work harmoniously in a gang of rogues. The odds against his doing so may be calculated exactly by the number that comprise the gang. It is not only on principle that they object to him. Unless he “does as they do,” he becomes a witness against them every time he pays his money in. And he does as they do. It is so much easier to do so than, in the condition of a man labouring hard for comparatively less pay than a common road-scraper earns, to stand up single handed to champion the cause of honesty in favour of a company who are undisguisedly in favour of a snug and comfortable compromise, and has no wish to be “bothered.”

It is a great scandal that such a system should be permitted to exist; and a body of employers mean enough to connive at such bargain-making, can expect but small sympathy from the public if the dishonesty it tacitly encourages picks it to the bones. What are the terms of the contract between employer and employed? In plain language these: “We are perfectly aware that you apply to us well knowing our system of doing business, and with the deliberate intention of robbing us all you safely can; and in self-defence, therefore, we will pay you as what you may, if you please, regard as wages, two-pence three farthings an hour, or four shillings per day of seventeen hours. We know that the probabilities are, that you will add to that four shillings daily to the extent of another five or six. It is according to our calculation that you will do so. Our directors have arrived at the conclusion, that as omnibus conductors, of the ordinary type, you cannot be expected to rob us of a less sum than that, and we are not disposed to grumble so long as you remain so moderate; but do not, as you value your situation with all its accompanying privileges, go beyond that. As a man who only robs us of say, five shillings a day, we regard you as a fit and proper person to wait on our lady and gentleman passengers; to attend to their convenience and comfort, in short, as a worthy representative of the L. G. O. C. But beware how you outstrip the bounds of moderation as we unmistakably define them for you! Should you do so, we will kick you out at a moment’s notice, and on no consideration will we ever again employ you.”

Taking this view of the case, the omnibus conductor, although entitled to a foremost place in the ranks of thieves non-professional, can scarcely be said to be the least excusable amongst the fraternity. There are many who, looking down on the “cad” from their pinnacle of high respectability, are ten times worse than he is. Take the shopkeeper thief for instance. He is by far a greater villain than the half-starved wretch who snatches a leg of mutton from a butcher’s hook, or some article of drapery temptingly flaunting outside the shop of the clothier, because in the one case the crime is perpetrated that a soul and a woefully lean body may be saved from severance, and in the other case the iniquity is made to pander to the wrong-doer’s covetous desire to grow fat, to wear magnificent jewellery, and to air his unwieldy carcase annually at Margate.

He has enough for his needs. His deservings, such as they are, most liberally attend him; but this is not enough. The “honest penny” is very well to talk about; in fact, in his cleverly assumed character of an upright man, it is as well to talk about it loudly and not unfrequently, but what fudge it is if you come to a downright blunt and “business” view of the matter to hope ever to make a fortune by the accumulation of “honest pennies!” Why, thirty of the shabby things make no more than half-a-crown if you permit each one to wear its plain stupid face, whereas if you plate it neatly and tender it—backed by your reputation for respectability, which your banking account of course proves beyond a doubt—it will pass as genuine silver, and you make two and five-pence at a stroke! You don’t call it “making,” you robbers of the counter and money-till, that is a vulgar expression used by “professional” thieves; you allude to it as “cutting it fine.” Neither do you actually plate copper pennies and pass them off on the unwary as silver half-crowns. Unless you were very hard driven indeed, you would scorn so low and dangerous a line of business. Yours is a much safer system of robbery. You simply palm off on the unwary customer burnt beans instead of coffee, and ground rice instead of arrowroot, and a mixture of lard and turmeric instead of butter. You poison the poor man’s bread. He is a drunkard, and you are not even satisfied to delude him of his earnings for so long a time as he may haply live as a wallower in beer and gin, that is beer and gin as originally manufactured; you must, in order to screw a few halfpence extra and daily out of the poor wretch, put grains of paradise in his gin and coculus indicus in his malt liquor! And, more insatiable than the leech, you are not content with cheating him to the extent of twenty-five per cent. by means of abominable mixtures and adulteration, you must pass him through the mill, and cut him yet a little finer when he comes to scale! You must file your weights and dab lumps of grease under the beam, and steal an ounce or so out of his pound of bacon. If you did this after he left your premises, if you dared follow him outside, and stealthily inserting your hand into his pocket abstracted a rasher of the pound he had just bought of you, and he caught you at it, you would be quaking in the grasp of a policeman in a very short time, and branded in the newspapers as a paltry thief, you would never again dare loose the bar of your shop shutters. But by means of your dishonest scales and weights, you may go on stealing rashers from morning till night, from Monday morning till Saturday night that is, and live long to adorn your comfortable church pew on Sundays.

I must be excused for sticking to you yet a little longer, Mr. Shopkeeper Thief, because I hate you so. I hate you more than ever, and you will be rejoiced when I tell you why. A few months since, there seemed a chance that your long career of cruel robbery was about to be checked. An excellent lord and gentleman, Lord E. Cecil, made it his business to call the attention of the House of Commons to the state of the law with respect to false weights and measures, and the adulterations of food and drinks. His lordship informed honourable members that the number of convictions for false weights and measures during the past year amounted to the large number of thirteen hundred, and this was exclusive of six districts, namely: Southwark, Newington, St. George’s, Hanover Square, Paddington, and the Strand, which for reasons best known to the local authorities, made no return whatever. In Westminster alone, and within six months, a hundred persons were convicted, and it was found that of these twenty-four or nearly one-fourth of the whole were licensed victuallers, and forty-seven were dairymen, greengrocers, cheesemongers, and others, who supplied the poor with food, making in all seventy per cent. of provision dealers. In the parish of St. Pancras, the convictions for false weights and measures exceed those of every other parish. But in future, however much the old iniquity may prevail, the rogue’s returns will show a handsome diminution. This has been managed excellently well by the shrewd vestrymen themselves. When the last batch of shopkeeper-swindlers of St. Pancras were tried and convicted, the ugly fact transpired that not a few of them were gentlemen holding official positions in the parish. This was serious. The meddlesome fellows who had caused the disagreeable exposure were called a “leet jury,” whose business it was to pounce on evil doers whenever they thought fit, once in the course of every month. The vestry has power over this precious leet jury, thank heaven! and after sitting in solemn council, the vestrymen, some of them doubtless with light weights confiscated and deficient gin and beer measures rankling in their hearts, passed a resolution, that in future the leet jury was to stay at home and mind its own business, until the vestry clerk gave it liberty to go over the ground carefully prepared for it.

Alluding to the scandalous adulteration of food, Lord E. Cecil remarked, “The right hon. gentleman, the President of the Board of Trade, in one of his addresses by which he had electrified the public and his constituents, stated that the great panacea for the ills of the working class was a free breakfast table. Now he, Lord E. Cecil, was the last person in the world to object to any revision of taxation if it were based upon really sound grounds. But with all due deference to the right hon. gentleman, there was one thing of even more importance, namely, a breakfast table free from all impurities.” And then his lordship proceeded to quote innumerable instances of the monstrous and dangerous injustice in question, very much to the edification of members assembled, if reiterated “cheers,” and “hear, hear,” went for anything. This was promising, and as it should be. As Lord Cecil remarked, “when I asked myself why it is that this great nation which boasts to be so practical, and which is always ready to take up the grievances of other people, has submitted so tamely to this monstrous and increasing evil, the only answer I could give was that what was everybody’s business had become nobody’s business.” Doubtless this was the view of the case that every member present on the occasion took, and very glad they must have been when they found that what was everybody’s business had become somebody’s business at last.

And what said the President of the Board of Trade when he came to reply to the motion of Lord Cecil: “That in the opinion of the House it is expedient that Her Majesty’s Government should give their earliest attention to the wide-spread and most reprehensible practice of using false weights and measures, and of adulterating food, drinks, and drugs, with a view of amending the law as regards the penalties now inflicted for those offences, and of providing more efficient means for the discovery and prevention of fraud”? Did the right hon. President promptly and generously promise his most cordial support for the laudable object in view? No. Amazing as it may appear to the great host of working men that furnish the shopkeeping rogue with his chief prey, and who to a man are ready to swear by the right hon. gentleman, he did nothing of the kind. He started by unhesitatingly expressing his opinion that the mover of the question, quite unintentionally of course, had much exaggerated the whole business. And further, that although there might be particular cases in which great harm to health and much fraud might possibly be shown, yet general statements of the kind in question were dangerous, and almost certain to be unjust.