The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, October 1883Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Philosophy
The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, October 1883
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Institution -- Periodicals; Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle -- Periodicals
protection from the trade of vice is extended to twenty-one.
Secondly, let us recognize it as an axiom that parental rights do
not exist when wholly severed from parental duties; or, in other
words, that the child has its rights as well as the parent, and that
its indefeasible right is, in South’s strong words, “to be born and
not damned into the world.” Let it be recognized, then, that no
child of either sex is to be brought up in a den of infamy, and to
attend school from thence to the contamination of the children of the
respectable poor, the magistrates being no longer allowed to defeat
this beneficent provision of the Industrial Schools Act, and parental
responsibility being recognized by the parent being compelled to
pay toward the Christian and industrial training of the child; all
children living in, or frequenting, thieves’ dens and disorderly houses
to be at once removed. Let day industrial schools be formed for the
lowest class of children, so as to introduce some classification in
our board schools, the want of which is one of their gravest defects.
Let us adopt emigration to our colonies for our pauper and destitute
children, whenever possible. Any one who has gone into the question
can corroborate Mr. Samuel Smith’s statement in his able article in
the May number of the _Nineteenth Century_, that “£15 per head covers
all expenses, including a few months’ preparatory training, outfit,
passage, etc.” The average cost of each child in the metropolitan
district schools is nearly £25 per annum. About 11,000 pauper children
are brought up in these large establishments at a cost to the
ratepayers of London of £250,000 per annum. Probably each child is
kept, on the average, five years, costing, say, £120 in all. Truly Mr.
Smith may well add, “with a blindness that is incomprehensible, the
guardians have preferred herding them together at a vast expense, and
refused till quite lately to allow emigration to be tried.” And for
those children who through bad health, or any other disability, are
unable to emigrate, and can not be boarded out, as well as children
whose drunken and dissolute parents are bringing them up to crime, let
there be an order of teaching deaconesses instituted, and a state-aided
training college, where educated ladies may receive training in the
management of an industrial school, and from which the guardians can
supply themselves with mothers for cottage homes on the plan of the
Village Homes of Ilford, where the cost of a child is £14, instead of
£25. By this arrangement the children would come under higher influence
than the uneducated workhouse officials. Hundreds of ladies are wanting
remunerative employment, and would gladly undertake this, if they
could be put in the way of the work by a little preliminary training,
and freed from the necessity of “doing the washing” in the cottage
home. And, lastly, let it be a recognized theory that every Christian
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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