Crime -- England -- London -- History -- 19th century; London (England) -- Moral conditions; London (England) -- Social conditions
There are other neglected children besides those already enumerated, and
who are not included in the tenth part of a million who live in the
streets, for the simple reason that they are too young to know the use of
their legs. They are “coming on,” however. There is no present fear of
the noble annual crop of a hundred thousand diminishing. They are so
plentifully propagated that a savage preaching “civilization” might
regard it as a mercy that the localities of their infant nurture are such
as suit the ravening appetites of cholera and typhus. Otherwise they
would breed like rabbits in an undisturbed warren, and presently swarm so
abundantly that the highways would be over-run, making it necessary to
pass an Act of Parliament, improving on the latest enacted for dogs,
against the roaming at large of unmuzzled children of the gutter.
Observe the vast number of “city Arabs,” to be encountered in a walk,
from Cheapside to the Angel at Islington, say. You cannot mistake them.
There are other children who are constantly encountered in the street,
male and female, who, though perhaps neither so ragged and dirty as the
genuine juvenile vagrants, are even more sickly and hungry looking; but
it is as easy to distinguish between the two types—between the
_home-owning_ and the _homeless_, as between the sleek pet dog, and the
cur of the street, whose ideas of a “kennel” are limited to that
represented by the wayside gutter, from which by good-luck edibles may be
extracted. Not only does the youthful ragamuffin cry aloud for remedy in
every street and public way of the city, he thrusts his ugly presence on
us continuously, and appeals to us in bodily shape. In this respect, the
curse of neglected children differs widely from any of the others,
beggars alone excepted, perhaps. And even as regards beggars, to see
them is not always to believe in them as human creatures helpless in the
sad condition in which they are discovered, and worthy of the best help
we can afford to bestow on them. It is next to impossible by outward
signs merely to discriminate between the impostor and the really
unfortunate and destitute. The pallid cheek and the sunken eye, may be a
work of art and not of nature, and in the cunning arrangement of rags, so
as to make the most of them, the cheat must always have an advantage over
the genuine article. Weighing the evidence _pro._ and _con._, the object
of it creeping even at his snail’s pace may be out of sight before we
arrive at what appears to us a righteous verdict, and our scrupulous
charity reserved for another, occasion. But no such perplexing doubts
and hesitation need trouble us in selecting the boy gutter bred and born
from the one who lays claim to a home, even though it may be no more than
a feeble pretence, consisting of a family nightly gathering in some dirty
sty that serves as a bedroom, and a morning meeting at a board spread
with a substitute for a breakfast. In the latter there is an expression
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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