Begging schools.

kind of the crime coming under the denomination of summary convictions. The alternation of the periods of gluttony and starvation, idleness and of spasmodic physical exertion, must lead to a debasement of mind. The intervals, frequently long, of their desultory occupation, must be filled up of necessity by habits of mendicancy and peculation. "To my mind," says Mayhew, "vagrancy is the physical cause of crime." Many of the reputed thieves in London are nocturnal marauders in winter and vagabonds in summer.

Begging was declared years ago, and may be reiterated with undiminished emphasis, in the present day, to be practised more in London than in any other city in Europe. In one of the reports presented to the House of Commons, "it was stated in evidence that two houses in St. Giles (which is the principal resort of beggars), are frequented by considerably more than 200 persons, who hold in them a kind of club from which all who are not of their profession are excluded; that children are let out by the day, and that the hire paid for deformed chidren is sometimes as high as 4s. per day, and that a regular school is kept in the same district where children are instructed in the arts necessary to their success as beggars. It has been stated that the number of professional beggars in and about London amounts to 15,000, more than two-thirds of whom are Irish.”*

Now, when it is remembered that the professed vagrant is a vagabond and thief, out of sheer necessity at certain times, and always a part of the dangerous classes in society, and that children are carried about by their parents, or those who hire them, and are thus early habituated to the pleasures, the hardships, and the vices of a roaming life; nay, that children are essential to success in a vagrant

"Penny Cyclopædia."

career, then it will be easily admitted, that vagrancy, which is closely allied to mendicancy and theft, is a primary cause of juvenile depravity.

juvenile

"How," asks a county magistrate,* "does juvenile The rise of delinquency arise? Soon after birth the child is carried delinquency. into the street with some slender, filthy covering of rags, exposed to the cold and damp blast of our shifting temperature, that his shrill cry of agony may the better wring the pittance from the passer-by. A cry it has been more than once established made the more agonizing by the application of human agency. So soon as the little urchin can lisp the cry "puir wean," or its tiny limbs carry its stinted body, it is thrown out of its dirty den into the streets, to beset the doors of the more blessed, or to interrupt the passengers on their busy thoroughfares, with importunate appeals to charity in a tone of whining from which he can never afterwards divest himself. If he returns to the cellarage without the expected amount of prey, a sound beating, interspersed with curses, may be his welcome. He never hears of a God, except as a name of imprecation. He seldom has heard of Heaven, but often of its opposite, as the place to which any outbreak of paternal ire summarily consigns him. A Bible he never saw in the house, and though it were put into his hands, he could not spell its simplest text. The Sabbath he knows only as a day when the shops are shut, and all business arrested save that of the whiskey shop. The church bells are rung, and he observes a portion of the people better dressed than on other days, but in his sphere it is a day noted only as one of greater idleness and sensuality than other days. What can be expected from such a childhood?-from such a culture in the spring-day of life?"

* "Juvenile Delinquency," by a County Magistrate.

The following will illustrate the organized system pursued, and suggest the necessity of the stringent measures required for the suppression of this social evil and national stigma. The table is compiled from the First Report of the Constabulary Force Commissioners :

vagrants.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

According to the same report, there were in Chelmsford several lodging-houses, where it was estimated that about 2,000 vagrants resorted. In Chester there were from 150 to 200 of these receptacles. "Though the houses in Chelmsford are small, yet as many as thirty travellers, or even thirty-five, have been found in one house; fifteen have been found sleeping in one room, three or four in a bed, men, women, and children, promiscuously; beds have been found occupied in a cellar. The lodging

houses at Chelmsford are made the centre of a kind of Ubiquity of circuit, which the people make almost periodically." Generally speaking, they are the "flash-house" of the small district; the receiving-house for stolen goods, the most extensively established school for juvenile delinquency, and commonly the most infamous of houses in the locality. No one can refuse assent to the opinion expressed by the Commissioners-" That it is manifest that in any efficient arrangement for the prevention of crime within the rural districts, the means of suppressing or controlling the common lodging-houses must have a prominent place."

Orphanage.

§ 6. Orphanage must be next specified as one of the ac

cessory causes of juvenile depravity. This source of destitution and fountain of crime is, perhaps, the only one in which parents are not chargeable with guilt. But the calamity is retrievable, and its tributary character to sin is owing entirely to our selfish indifference. Many of the frequenters of low lodging - houses are orphans in the largest acceptation of that term. Some are fatherlessothers have lost their mother; some have practically lost the only parent death has spared by a second marriage of either father or mother; many have progenitors who are not parents as cruel desertion demonstrates. Others, again, have fathers and mothers, whose ignorance, destitution, or vicious habits render them totally incapable of discharging their parental responsibilities.

The absence of so many from home while engaged on sea, as sailors, or the protracted absence of fishermen, virtually place many, with both parents living, in the list of those who have lost a father or a mother. Of late, too, the extensive practice of husbands emigrating and leaving their families, frequently with no other means than those in prospect, is a fruitful source of a kind of orphanage. How complicated, indeed, is this matter! Death is busy at its fearful game everywhere. An epidemic, an explosion in the collieries, or in the steamboat, the loss of a fishing smack, or a wreck, will suddenly become the occasion of destitution to scores and hundreds of children. The annexed statistics will show the number of children who are annually thrown upon the world from one particular cause. From returns made last year, it appears that within the short period of a single month 148 persons lost life by explosions in the collieries. The result was, 66 widows, 1,217 orphans. Such a disastrous catalogue is not a rare exception. Turn whichever way you will, and official reports from prisons, or penal reformatory schools, will combine with the ragged school statistics

Number of orphans.

Their sad

fate.

to point to orphanage as an indirect cause of juvenile delinquency.

"It has been calculated that there are 700 orphans committed to the prisons of our country every year; that there are 2,000 committed of those who are deprived of one of their parents, so that there are nearly 3,000 annually left without their natural guardians to guide them into the paths of duty and to instil into them the practice of virtue."*

At the meeting of thieves before referred to, nineteen had both parents living, thirty-nine had lost one, and eighty both father and mother.

Among the inmates of Redhill Farm, Reigate, are the following proportions :

In 1850, there were in the institution twenty-seven who had lost both parents, nineteen their father, and twelve their mother.

In 1852, there were in the same institution twenty-nine who had lost both parents, twenty-five their father, thirtyeight their mother, and seven were illegitimate.

In Aberdeen, there were in the Industrial Feeding Schools, in the three years ending 1846, eight orphans, thirteen motherless, fourteen deserted, and ninety-eight fatherless children.

To avoid prolixity, we may refer the inquirer to the statistics of ragged schools in any part of the country to learn the extent to which orphanage prevails in the land.

It is heart-rending to know that the child, suddenly deprived of his natural protectors, wanders in our streets begging and crying, till becoming acquainted with persons of his own age who are professed beggars, or reputed thieves, he is led to the lodging-houses resorted to by these wretched children, and there victimized and initiated into

* Report of Conference.