"Once I saw her put the poker in the fire," said a neighbour (speaking of an own mother and her child of four and a half), "to get it red-hot. The child had vexed her. She held him down to the bed, and tied a cloth round his mouth; when the poker was hot she lifted his little petticoats up, and held the poker on the bottom of his back." One baby cooed in the cradle, and was startled with a loud thunderous curse; one cried of teething, and was beaten savagely with its father's big hand; two did the same, and were strapped, hanging by the heels from the strapper's hand. Besides canes, straps, whips, and boots, belts, and thongs of rope, the instruments of torture have been hammers; pokers, cold, and red-hot; wire toasting-forks--in one case the prongs of the fork hammered out, the stem untwisted a little up, making a sort of a birch of frayed wire; a file, with which the skin on projecting bones had been rasped raw; a hot stove, on which the child's bare thighs were put; hot fire-grates, against which little fat hands were held. Never were even churches put to such Christian purposes as were Her Majesty's prisons, when they held the doers of such deeds as these, and were making their backs to well ache with hard labour. You are shocked at that horrible catalogue. But is it not strange that in not one of all these cases did anybody, who was troubled about them, ever think of going to tell a minister of the gospel--you people who claim to be the successors of the man of Nazareth? Nor did they go to a City missionary! Of the 1400 cases sent into the office of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in London during its five years' existence, not one has come from a City missionary. When speaking of the starvation of children to one of them, he said to me, "Yes, I knew two cases last winter, one after another; they were just starved to death. It was a shocking affair." To which I replied, in surprised indignation, "Why did you not tell us?" "Oh," he replied with a perfectly satisfied air, "if I were to meddle in things like that, I could not do my more spiritual work." "I know several children marked for death," said a London vicar's daughter, and his district visitor, the other day, "but I cannot give their parents' names. We should be subject to such persecution if we were to interfere." The fact that There's a friend of little children, Above the bright blue sky, ought to fall like a warning thunderbolt out of heaven on such people's ears! I have repeated these two sayings, because they speak volumes on the "religious" surroundings of tortured child life in England. Both of them referred to children being deliberately starved to death. I will give you a sample of the condition in which some of these starved children, unseen, and quietly, die.