第28章 THE CHILDREN OF THE LOST.(1)

Whatever may be thought of the possibility of doing anything with the adults,it is universally admitted that there is hope for the children.

"I regard the existing generation as lost,"said a leading Liberal statesman."Nothing can be done with men and women who have grown up under the present demoralising conditions.My only hope is that the children may have a better chance.Education will do much."But unfortunately the demoralising circumstances of the children are not being improved--are,indeed,rather,in many respects,being made worse.The deterioration of our population in large towns is one of the most undisputed facts of social economics.The country is the breeding ground of healthy citizens.But for the constant influx of Countrydom,Cockneydom would long ere this have perished.

But unfortunately the country is being depopulated.The towns,London especially,are being gorged with undigested and indigestible masses of labour,and,as the result,the children suffer grievously.

The town-bred child is at a thousand disadvantages compared with his cousin in the country.But every year there are more town-bred children and fewer cousins in the country.To rear healthy children you want first a home;secondly,milk;thirdly,fresh air;and fourthly,exercise under the green trees and blue sky.All these things every country labourer's child possesses,or used to possess.

For the shadow of the City life lies now upon the fields,and even in the remotest rural district the labourer who tends the cows is often denied the milk which his children need.The regular demand of the great towns forestalls the claims of the labouring hind.Tea and slops and beer take the place of milk,and the bone and sinew of the next generation are sapped from the cradle.But the country child,if he has nothing but skim milk,and only a little of that,has at least plenty of exercise in the fresh air.He has healthy human relations with his neighbours.He is looked after,and in some sort of fashion brought into contact with the life of the hall,the vicarage,and the farm.He lives a natural life amid the birds and trees and growing crops and the animals of the fields.He is not a mere human ant,crawling on the granite pavement of a great urban ants'nest,with an unnaturally developed nervous system and a sickly constitution.

But,it will be said,the child of to-day has the inestimable advantage of Education.No;he has not.Educated the children are not.

They are pressed through "standards,"which exact a certain acquaintance with A B C and pothooks and figures,but educated they are not in the sense of the development of their latent capacities so as to make them capable for the discharge of their duties in life.

The new generation can read,no doubt.Otherwise,where would be the sale of "Sixteen String Jack,""Dick Turpin,"and the like?But take the girls.Who can pretend that the girls whom our schools are now turning out are half as well educated for the work of life as their grandmothers were at the same age?How many of all these mothers of the future know how to bake a loaf or wash their clothes?Except minding the baby--a task that cannot be evaded--what domestic training have they received to qualify them for being in the future the mothers of babies themselves?

And even the schooling,such as it is,at what an expense is it often imparted!The rakings of the human cesspool are brought into the school-room and mixed up with your children.Your little ones,who never heard a foul word and who are not only innocent,but ignorant,of all the horrors of vice and sin,sit for hours side by side with little ones whose parents are habitually drunk,and play with others whose ideas of merriment are gained from the familiar spectacle of the nightly debauch by which their mothers earn the family bread.

It is good,no doubt,to learn the ABC,but it is not so good that in acquiring these indispensable rudiments,your children should also acquire the vocabulary of the harlot and the corner boy.I speak only of what I know,and of that which has been brought home to me as a matter of repeated complaint by my Officers,when I say that the obscenity of the talk of many of the children of some of our public schools could hardly be outdone even in Sodom and Gomorrha.Childish innocence is very beautiful;but the bloom is soon destroyed,and it is a cruel awakening for a mother to discover that her tenderly nurtured boy,or her carefully guarded daughter,has been initiated by a companion into the mysteries of abomination that are concealed in the phrase--a house of ill-fame.