buted their commencement in a career of vice to the influence of such works. An expression of approbation from one of them of Jack Sheppard, "was almost universally concurred in by the deafening plaudits which followed." When asked if they would like to be "Jack Sheppards! they answered, "Yes, if the times were the same now as they were then."

taste.

This is but the natural effect of reading such works on The popular the thief or burglar. The general tone of feeling, the popular juvenile taste, is not only low, but this state of things is fostered by the ignorant or injudicious friends of children. The following are stated to be the works most in demand in the streets :-Cinderella, Jack the Giant Killer, Baron Munchausen, Puss and the Seven-leagued Boots, The Sleeping Beauty, the Seven Champions of Christendom, &c. &c. "There's plenty of Henry and Emmas,” said a penny bookseller, "and A Present for Christmas, and Pictorial Alphabets, a Good Book for Good Boys and Girls, but when people buys really for their children they buys the old stories at least they does of me. I've sold penny hymns (hymn books) sometimes; but when they are bought, or 'good books' is bought, it is for charity to a poor fellow like me, more than anything else."

against

Such are the vices and the recreations of a majority A charge of the low juvenile population of the great city. Nor society. do these extracts seem to be over-coloured statements. From personal inquiry, from a gentleman intimately connected with a metropolitan ragged school, from a city missionary, and from conversation with the ragged child in the street, we feel that the truth is not on the whole sacrificed to the love of exaggeration. Children driven to a street life "have been either untaught, mistaught, maltreated, neglected, regularly trained to vice, or fairly turned into the streets to shift for themselves. The censure, then, is

London and the provinces.

attributable to parents, or to those who should fill the place of parents-the state, or society."

From a perusal of the preceding painful account, culled principally from a work extraordinary in many respects, the impression on the mind of the reader will be that it is worse than idle to mystify the philosophy of juvenile depravity and consequent increase of juvenile delinquency. That the corruption of the masses of the lower orders of society can be traced to the existence of such deteriorating influences as have been, with extreme reluctance, above detailed, is written with a sunbeam upon the surface presented by the general character of the juvenile population in our large towns.

§ 9. If less extended notices of the children of provincial towns has been taken, it is not because materials are wanting. References made to the experience of Francis Bishop in the purlieus of Liverpool; to the "Rise of Juvenile Delinquency," by a county magistrate; to the appearance of the streets of Bristol, &c., show that the seeds of corruption are "broad-cast" upon the face of this Christian country. Were there no analogy presented by our provincial towns to the metropolis, there are obvious and important reasons for giving the preference to the juvenile population of the great city. The summer excursions into the country, the systematic and stated rounds to every nook and corner of the land by vagrants and their wretched families, which support the low lodging-houses in every town and village, and keep in perfect circulation the plans and vices of the most experienced thieves and vagrants to be found in the world-those of Londonshow, that the reclamation, reformation, or extirpation of the class in London would be to heal the waters at the fountain-head, or stop the stream that deluges the country with vice. The number of the costermongers, as we have shown, is estimated at about thirty thousand. The

number of street children is stated to be about ten thousand-a number annually increasing. Nor is the number of this class the only, or the greatest reason for particular attention. The fearful power they would throw into the hands of discontented insurgents-for they are all Chartists or the influence they would contribute to the Romanist party-for they are predisposed, if at all inclined towards any religious sect, to avow attachment to Roman Catholicism-render them a dangerous class to both our political and religious institutions. There is another view that will affect the heart of the philanthropist. "Of all the classes they should be the most honest, since the poor (who depend upon them for provisions) least of all can afford to be defrauded; and yet it has been shown that the consciences of the London costermongers, generally speaking, are as little developed as their intellect."

ness.

Adverting once more to their moral and physical con- Wretcheddition, we shall beg the reader to accompany us, in the ensuing chapters, to the more pleasing task of considering the duty of society to rescue these unhappy portions of the community from their perilous position. "What little information the street children' receive is obtained from the worst class from cheats, vagabonds, and rogues; what little amusement they indulge in springs from sources the most poisonous, the most fatal to happiness and welfare; what little they know of a home is necessarily associated with much that is vile and base: their very means of existence, uncertain and precarious as it is, is, to a great extent, identified with petty chicanery, which is quickly communicated by one to the other; while their physical sufferings from cold, hunger, exposure to the weather, and other causes of a similar nature, are constant, and at times exceedingly severe. The fate of children brought up amid the influence of such scenes, with parents starving one week, and intoxicated all the rest-turned loose into the

Divine rebuke.

streets as soon as they are old enough to run alone—sent out to sell in public-houses, almost before they know how to put halfpence together-their tastes trained to libidinism, long before puberty, at the penny concert, and their passions inflamed with unrestrained intercourse of the twopenny hops-the fate of the young, I say, abandoned to the blight of such associations cannot well be otherwise than it is. If the child be father to the man, it assuredly does not require great effort of imagination to conceive the manhood that such a child must necessarily engender."

....

The

From

"Ah, sinful nation; a people laden with iniquity-a seed of evil-doers-children that are corruptors! whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. the sole of the foot even unto the head, there is no soundness in it, but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores. They have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment."*

Have we not tracked the felon home, and found

His birth-place and his dam? The country mourns,
Mourns because every plague that can infest
Society, and that saps and worms the base

Of the edifice that Policy has raised,

Swarms in all quarters: meets the eye, the ear,
And suffocates the breath at every turn.
Profusion breeds them: and the cause itself
Of that calamitous mischief has been found;
So when the Jewish leader stretched his arm,
And waved his rod divine, a race obscure,
Spawned in the muddy beds of the Nile, came forth
Polluting Egypt; gardens, fields, and plains,
Were covered with the pest; the streets were filled;
The croaking nuisance lurked in every nook,
Nor palaces, nor even chambers 'scaped:

And the land stank-so numerous was the fry."

COWPER, The Task.

Isaiah i. 4-6.

CHAPTER III.

CHILDREN-THEIR MORAL CLAIMS UPON THE
COMMUNITY.

"Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow, which came up in a night, and perished in a night; and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left?"-JONAH iv. 11.

observations.

§ 1. THE present state of juvenile depravity, and the Introductory great number and variety of inducing causes, have been passed under review. The important questions now are— Ought anything to be attempted by society to anticipate the corrupters of our children?" Can any effectual remedy be pointed out to meet the fearful and growing evil?" It requires but little acquaintance with the world to know that there are some who are not troubled with the latter interrogatory because disposed to answer the former in the negative. Happily this class are daily numbering less. While, however, the theories that inculcated the contempt of the lower classes have gradually died away, a better state of feeling has not simultaneously arisen. The result has been simple neglect. Jonah's solicitude for the gourd, and strange oversight of the welfare of 120,000 infants, are unfortunately the precedents followed by the myriads that inhabit our great cities. Of the flower of the field Christ