God's Answers: A Record of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in CanadaLowe, Clara M. S.
Religion
God's Answers: A Record of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada
Lowe, Clara M. S.
Canada -- Emigration and immigration; Church work with children; Home missions; Macpherson, Annie
"Ninety-eight per cent, of our children do well, and for the two per
cent, we do the best we can. If any circumstance arises making it
desirable for a farmer to give up a boy, he is at once returned to
the Home, where he is received and kept until another more suitable
place is found for him."
Should any be still blinded to the blessings of emigration for the
young, surely their eyes will be opened on reading the following
facts as related by Miss Macpherson:--
"William and Mary were brother and sister living in a terrible
warren near Drury Lane. The boy's employment was to gather rags and
bones. Their parents had been buried by the workhouse. Their
condition was too deplorable to be described. A year's training was
not lost upon this sister and brother. They came to Canada in 1873.
Now, could yon see them at nineteen and twenty-two--able to read and
write, well-clothed with their own honest earnings, having saved, in
1877, one hundred dollars; and this year, 1879, William is having
$100 as wages, and Mary $60. They come from time to time to visit the
Home. William is thinking of having a farm of his own.
"A. B.--Who was he? The son of a drunken woman, who, when very
tipsy still comes in from Ratcliff Highway to abuse us at
Spitalfields. Alfred has been many years in a lawyer's family, and
has saved enough money to be apprenticed as an engineer. He was a
wise boy to be guided by the kind counsel of those he served. We are
not satisfied with earthly adoptions only; we continue to pray that
each one may be adopted into the family of those who are washed in
the blood of the Lamb.
"Well do we remember the winter, when a wild man from Seven Dials
discovered that we had the little Annie, of whom he used to make such
traffic in the gin palaces; though we had no right to her. The lamb
was but six years old. Thank God, an ocean separates her from his
drunken villanies. Now she is with kind-hearted, homely people, the
companion and playmate of their daughter.
"S. W., seven years old; so puny--only a few pounds weight--owing to
her being starved and beaten by a drunken stepfather. Now, a year in
a happy home, going to school regularly, is companion to an only
child, and lacks no earthly comfort. The poor mother was ill-used in
the dens where she lived by her neighbours, for having, they said,
sold her child. We received a photograph of the little one from her
happy Canadian home; this closed every mouth, for it could not be
gainsaid.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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