HUMANITY OF DICKENS. 509 and the despairing look of the familiar child of wretchedness meets his mild, keen glance, although there should be none other to register its sullen grief. "He makes the cries of the poor to be heard in the palace, and gets the miserable an entrance into the great man's house. The poor orphan, that finds what it is to be in a solitary desert in the thick-peopled city; that, surrounded by a million of professing Christians, is yet alone, and without hope in the world; that tells his dreadful story with patient sadness, but gets no one in that dense, bustling, busy, money-getting crowd, to hear him for his cause; why he, of all that populous cavalcade, arrests one passing stranger, and he, pen in hand, proclaims his brother's wrongs through the wide extent of broad Britain. "And that same cunning penman, how strange his taste! He finds a - forlorn infant so desperate in fortune that even its miserable mother has left it on the steps to do or die; and of all the cases for the genteel humane, the drawing-room Christianity, the silk-stockings-and-pumps philanthropy of the times, it so turns out that he will have none other, but only this. He walks straight into the workhouse, and when other men see only some parish brats that are to be abused, and poisoned, and sickened with insult and bad usage into early death, why there he sees the soft, innocent, ingenuous, grief-shaded countenance of thoughtful boyhood, and his sound heart yearns the more to him that he has neither father nor mother, nay, none other to take his part in all this selfish, money-getting, civil-barbarous age and nation, save this one great and glorious oak that flings out its fantastic branches to temper the wind to the shorn lamb. And when none other can plead for forsaken humanity, he, with the authority of omnipotent genius, knocks at the portals of greatness with a firmness that will not be said nay, and tells, with an eloquence that cannot be denied, 'the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.' God bless that good man! the God who stilleth the cry of the young raven, and who visiteth, in their affliction, the fatherless and the widow. "Listen to him; hear his words of truth and soberness; learn of one who hath been taught by him who was meek and lowly of heart. 'Now, when he thought how regularly things went on from day to day in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly, griping age lived tottering on; how crafty avarice grew rich, and manly, honest hearts were poor and sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down at night, and lived and died,—father and son, mother and child, race upon race, and generation upon generation,without a home to shelter them, or the energies of one single man directed 510 LESSONS TO THE RICH. to their aid; how, in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and never taught; how jail doors gaped and gallows loomed for thousands urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradles' heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of life; how many, who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice, and misery and wrong there was, and yet how the world rolled on from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight cause on which his thoughts were bent, he felt indeed that there was little ground for hope, and little cause or reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount: 'Take physic, pomp! Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, "Can the great ones of the earth calmly read but this one passage out of the thousand stirring appeals which everywhere meet them in these extraordinary volumes, on behalf of the little ones of this weary world, without some misgivings that all is not right? Is there not something in their feeble but plaintive cry, as here supported with the world of power; is there not, we say, something in it (like the pressure of an infant's little hand round the finger of the strong man), that sometimes spoils a fine dinner to those whose hearts are not just yet a piece of shrivelled parchment? Think, peer, for a brief moment; we say, think, as you read such a picture as this, do the springs of your carriage not feel more uneasy under you as you call to mind that it is built upon the morsel of the beggar? Are there no compunctious visitings of nature that 'steal on you ere you are aware,' when you feel that the little shivering, street-abandoned wretch, that gets his loaf by selling small ware, is robbed of the half of it to put diamonds in your shoe-buckles? Is it possible that you can see that skeleton, with the keen, sharpened, abject features of starvation, with two naked children and the famishing antic WHAT SPLENDOR COSTS THE POOR. 511 at her breast, whose unnatural, hideous caricature of humanity hardly admits it a place in the classification of the infancy of man, cowering at the foot of some deserted lane to eat their first meal for two days; can it be that you can see this, and forget that even such beings as these pay to you, by a law made by yourself for yourself, the half of every penny that they beg from some kind being but a little way less poor than themselves? "See that beautiful young duchess, so encompassed with the odor of refined aristocracy that, as she passes us, like the flitting of a cloud, the very sense aches at her; she seems to disdain the very ground she walks upon, and, like the sensitive plant, to shudder and contract into herself at the very contiguity of the poor; although, mayhap, she has sometimes. heard, in her crimson velvet pew, that, eighteen hundred years ago, some one declared them to be her brethren and sisters. She will fly the very sight of these horrid wretches, and swear a pretty oath by yea and nay,' because her coachman did not drive the other way, that her eyes might not be offended by the very look of these terrible creatures. 6 “A word in your ear, madam; aye, in your ivory-turned ear, where hang those diamond drops. Why, these sparkling pendants were bought with money robbed from those same beggars. That glittering necklace, 'which Jews might kiss and infidels adore,' believe it or not, is wrung from the hard hands of starving peasants, and every ring on those taper fingers has famished a family of your fellow-creatures. Woman! bright, beautiful, and gentle! in all whose steps is grace, and in every gesture dignity and love! Woman! pure as beautiful; kind as dignified; virtuous and noble, with fair religion 'emparadised in form of that sweet flesh,' is it possible you do not know, and yet are we sure you do not, that every birthday dress has driven a sister to the streets, and that there is not a ball at Almack's which is given at a less cost than alone fills the brothel List, ye landsmen, all to me!' There are three half-naked urchins thrust out of their mother's house to steal for bread! that is your doing. There are ten thousand patients in the metropolis perishing of typhus, actually more fatal than the plague; every hospital is full, and private houses are turned into fever-wards to meet the exigencies of the case. The fever is the fruit of famine, and that famine is your doing. “There is an infant in a sweet sleep, lying in a basket at the work-house door; the night is cold, and it hath sucked at its kind mother's breast until the want of food for two days hath brought her milk to its last thin drop. Merciful God! that hath taught us to address Thee as our kind parent, and is it indeed possible that the yearnings of a mother's heart can be stifled, and that she should no longer 512 THE PRICE OF A CHILD'S LIFE. 'Know what 't is to love the babe that milks her ?'* Yet there is no other way, for bread is high, and wages thereby small, and a family of dear little ones, that should be a blessing, if ever a blessing were, is a curse: for they have mouths, and their mouths are filled * In the London Telegraph of Dec., 1865, I find the following touching Christmas story of English life: "Stories are all the vogue now-Christmas stories, told on cream-tinted paper, with gold edges to it, and with ever so much crimson and green on the covers; stories all about princesses, giants and fairies, and showing how, in that delightful and highly desirable world of fiction, the bad people always come to grief and the good ones marry and live happy ever afterwards.' No misery lasts very long in them; no ugly problems are left unsolved. The last pages, instead of being blistered with tears, as those of life are so often, wind up with a jolly settlement of everybody and everything. Let the little ones think it is all true. Time enough for them to find out what a different world they will have to deal with, and what agony, despair and crime close the last chapters of many a story that God writes in the great book of Life, which has Eternity on both sides for its covers. We have a little story to tell to the oldsters, before they settle down to their Christmas dinners with that comfortable conviction which roast beef and pluin pudding inspire, that everything has gone right since Christianity came. Our story is not very fit for Christmas, except to make the beef taste of tears and the plum pudding stick in the throat with shame and pity. Before you set to work upon these religious luxuries, good public, permit us to ask if you have such a thing as two shillings about you.' Of course you have, and the multiple of that sum for any number of weeks. Well, spend them now as you like; but last summer you might have bought a child's life and a woman's soul for two shillings a week sterling. People ought not to complain that things are dear,' when such a bargain as that can be made in England. Now, we repeat, it is too late; for the child's life-price one shilling-is gone to Him who in all His treasury of planets and suns has nothing richer or dearer than a child's life; and the woman's soul is so stained with murder, that the shilling is wanted now for five yards of hempen rope to choke it out of her on the gallows. In spite of these particulars, so tantalizing to a commercial people, the story, we say again, is not a nice story; the details are very unpleasant, the characters stale and vulgar to the last degree, and the chief personage a widow of forty two, haggard and grizzled before her time. Such as it is, however, this is how it was told at the Leicester Assizes. Eliza Adkins was the widow of a farm servant, who died and left her with one child, aged four. Let us note,in passing that the story books would have made some provision or other for an honest woman in such a case. Reality didn't. The mother went into service, and put the child out to nurse; but that demands funds, and Eliza Adkins only just earned her own living, so she applied to the workhouse for two shillings weekly to maintain the child. The workhouse said she must come in with it, which she did. After she had been in Loughborough Workhouse a week, she left it, according to her own story, 'Because the treatment was so bad I could not stay, and because they dragged the child away and beat it, and I couldn't bear it.' According to the story of the officials, confirmed by the guardians, she went away because the workhouse was thoroughly comfortable, and because these paupers' have a nasty way of liking to starve, and of bringing everybody into publicity and trouble. "Anyhow, Eliza Adkins, with the child tied on her back, and a basket containing a pair of little boots in it, some gooseberries and a bit of rope, came forth. If the public prefers it, let us take the guardians' view, and say that she would not stay in the workhouse because people of her kind like starving. The next scene is a cottage at Pegg's Green, where she called and asked leave to sit down. There is nothing like direct narration in Christmas stories, so we will ask Sarah Castledine to go on here. She was a cottager, and she testified that the prisoner had a child on her back, a boy about four years old, and asked if she could sit down, and she and the child sat down for about an hour. She said she had come a long way and had a long way to go to meet a friend. She asked if the water was still in the pits. The water had broken into some pits some time ago. I told her I thought they were at work again. She ENGLISH WORKHOUSE SYSTEM. 513 with sad cries because they cannot be filled with food. Will the landowners not 'mark, learn, and inwardly digest?' Let them reflect in time, 'ere the night cometh.' Let them give with grace and good will what may at last be wrung from them with nothing of either. The asked if there was as much charity given away as there used to be. I told her I thought not. The boy began to look tired and faint, and she took him on her knee, and he went to sleep. She said it had very bad boots on; she had a better pair, but she had taken them off to ease its feet. She was all of a tremble while she was at our house. When she left I was going out on an errand, and my mother said I could carry the child a little way. She said, "Oh, no; I will carry it myself. When it awakes it will walk as well as ever." She left our house between eight and nine, and went in the direction of Thringstone, and I saw her no more.' You must dip, good public, into the last part of our story to do full justice to this little bit of narrative, and then we doubt if you will find any other Christmas tale of the day so interesting. The friend she was going a long way to meet' was that good old friend of the poor and brokenhearted, whom it is wicked to go to meet, and for whom we must all wait-Death. She meant to drown the child and hang herself; loving the boy so well, meantime-the story books would never have thought of this-that she takes off the boots that pinch him, as he toddles by her side to meet the friend.' 'Are the pits full of water?' No! Then friend Death won't be met there; but the well at Kingston will do. She passes that about nightfall, and, having made up her mind, Eliza Adkins falls to casual topics. 'Much charity given away here?" she asks. Sarah Castledine thinks not.' Eliza Adkins obviously thinks not too,' since, for lack of two shillings a week, she is going to send her little son presently to heaven, and herself, if the pulpits are all right,' to hell. And look at these paupers that murder, and cottagers that poach. What a brutal set they are! Sarah Castledine, instigated by her mother, wants to carry the woman's child, and the widow, with the well and rope in her mind, is yet woman enough not to trouble the poor people. Well, we have spoiled our story by telling all the plot; but we do think that the little conversation at Pegg's Green reads the better for what's coming. "What's coming' has, of course, been guessed; the summer night passed, and Eliza Adkins turns up in the morning, at another cottage, without the child. Having murdered him, and meaning to murder herself, a lie or two more or less can't improve the Devil's bargain; so she says he died of croup, and that the neighbors clubbed 18. 6d. to bury him. She tells Ann Lacy that; and again we digress to observe what an ungrateful set the poor are to the nice workhouses and the generous overseers. 'Oh!' says Ann Lacy, 'dead and buried, is it? What reason you have to be thankful for taking him from the frowns of the world, and the frowns of the parish !' If kind Ann Lacy had known how much closer her bad grammar came to the truth than good grammar could have done, Eliza Adkins would have missed that little bit of parochial philosophy. But meantime somebody going to the well for water, finds the child there, and fishes it out, with some gooseberries and grass. The constables immediately seek the mother, and find her at her sister-in-law's. The well was kept locked; so Eliza Adkins, after all those incidents of changing the little shoes, and nursing the boy, and refusing to part with him for a minute to anybody, had positively broken a hole in the well-cover, by way of a gate to death and heaven. That was her view, and nothing else; witness her confession to the wife of the police inspector. She said to her: 'I want you to see the magistrate. You will do it better than me, my heart will be so full. Then I shall feel more comfortable. It is trouble that has brought me to it. I wanted the parish to allow me two shillings a week. They would not, but said I must go into the house. I could have got my own living. I went into the house; but the treatment was so bad I could not stay. I went in on Saturday and stayed till the following Friday, and I did not know what to do, for I had no home or friends in the world. I could have a place for myself; but I did not know what to do with the child. I could not bear to see it suffer any longer, and that made me do ill. God knows I did not do it with any bad intent. I know the poor child is in heaven now, out of all its troubles. If they had not |