This picture is foul and detestable enough, but it is perhaps in the treatment of children that the workhouse system causes the greatest unintentional cruelty. There are some 15,000 children actually living in General Mixed Workhouses. A large proportion of these have no separate sick ward for children, and no quarantine wards if there should be such a thing as an outbreak of measles or whooping cough. Young children are to be found in bed, with minor ailments, next to women of bad character under treatment for contagious disease, whilst other women in the same ward are in advanced stages of cancer and senile decay. Children come in daily contact with all the inmates, even the imbeciles and feeble minded are to be found at the same dining table with them. In this huge State nursery the nurses are almost universally pauper inmates, many of them more or less mentally defective. A medical Inspector's report in 1897, stated that in no less than "sixty four Workhouses imbeciles or weak-minded women are entrusted with the care of infants." One witness states that she has "frequently seen a classed imbecile in charge of a baby." In the great palatial workhouses of London and other large towns the Commissioners found that "the infants in the nursery seldom or never got into the open air." They found the nursery frequently on the third or fourth story of a gigantic block, often without balconies, whence the only means of access, even to the workhouse yard, was a lengthy flight of stone steps down which it was impossible to wheel a baby carriage of any kind. There was no staff of nurses adequate to carrying fifty or sixty infants out for airing. "In some of these workhouses," they write, "it was frankly admitted that the babies never left their own quarters, and the stench that we have described, during the whole period of their residence in the workhouse nursery." Seventy years have passed since it was written, and yet the "Cry of the Children" has as much meaning for us as it had for our grandfathers. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, The young birds are sleeping in the nest, The young fawns are playing with the shadows, The young flowers are blowing toward the west-- But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are weeping bitterly! They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free. And I am far from suggesting that all this evil is the result of any personal inhumanity of Boards of Guardians, Masters or Matrons or of their Inspectors and Governors in higher places. It is a matter in which each individual citizen must bear his share of blame for he knows it to exist, and he knows that he can have it altered if he cares to put his hand deep enough into his pocket, or if he will forgo some of the political luxuries dear to his party heart and give up the expenditure on them to the betterment of little children.