On 1 January, 1908, according to the Local Government Board return: 234,792 children were dependent on the State, either wholly or partially. Of these:-- 22,483 were in workhouses and workhouse infirmaries; 11,602 in district and separate, often called “barrack,” schools; 17,090 in village communities, scattered, receiving, and other Guardians’ homes; 11,251 in institutions other than those mentioned above; 8,565 boarded out in families of the industrial classes; and 163,801 receiving relief while still remaining with their parents. It is a portentous array, of nearly a quarter of a million of children, and each has an individual character. Pageants are now the fashion. Let us stand on one side of the stage (as did Stow, the historian, in the Whitechapel children’s pageant) and pass the verdict of the onlooker, as, primed with the figures and facts vouched for by the Royal Commissioners, we see the children of the State exhibit themselves in evidence of the care of their guardians. First the babies. Here they come, thousands of them, some born in the workhouse, tiny, pink crumpled-skinned mites of a few days old; others toddlers of under three, who have never known another home. “What a nice woman in the nurse’s cap and apron! I would trust her with any child. The head official, I suppose. But her under staff! What a terrible set! Those old women look idiotic and the young ones wicked. The inmates told off to serve in the nurseries you say they are! Surely no one with common humanity or sense would put a baby who requires wise observation under such women!” “Alas! but the Guardians do.” The Report states:-- “The whole nursery has often been found under the charge of a person actually certified as of unsound mind, the bottles sour, the babies wet, cold, and dirty. The Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded draws attention to an episode in connexion with one feeble-minded woman who was set to wash a baby; she did so in boiling water, and it died.” But this is no new discovery made by the recent Royal Commission. In 1897 Dr. Fuller, the Medical Inspector, reported to the Local Government Board that “in sixty-four workhouses imbeciles or weak-minded women are entrusted with the care of infants, as helps to the able-bodied or inferior women who are placed in charge by the matron, without the constant supervision of a responsible officer”. “We recognise,” acknowledges the Report of the Royal Commissioners, “that some improvement has since taken place; but, as we have ourselves seen, pauper inmates, many of them feeble-minded, are still almost everywhere utilized for handling the babies.... As things are, the visitor to a workhouse nursery finds it too often a place of intolerable stench, under quite insufficient supervision, in which it would be a miracle if the babies continued in health.”