I can find—must find, whether I will or no—in the open streets, shameful instances of neglect of children, intolerable toleration of the engenderment of paupers, idlers, thieves, races of wretched and destructive cripples both in body and mind; a misery to themselves, a misery to the community, a disgrace to civilization, and an outrage on Christianity. I know it to be a fact as easy of demonstration as any sum in any of the elementary rules of arithmetic, that if the State would begin its work and duty at the beginning, and would with the strong hand take those children out of the streets while they are yet children, and wisely train them, it would make them a part of England’s glory, not its shame—of England’s strength, not its weakness—would raise good soldiers and sailors, and good citizens, and many great men out of the seeds of its criminal population; it would clear London streets of the most terrible objects they smite the sight with—myriads of little children who awfully reverse our Saviour’s words, and are not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the Kingdom of Hell.

Nothing is more common in real life than a want of profitable reflection on the causes of many vices and crimes that awaken general horror. What is substantially true of families in this respect, is true of a whole commonwealth. As we sow, we reap. Let the reader go into the children’s side of any prison in England, or, I grieve to add, of many workhouses, and judge whether those are monsters who disgrace our streets, people our hulks and penitentiaries, and overcrowd our penal colonies, or are creatures whom we have deliberately suffered to be bred for misery and ruin.

Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness and self-respect, innate in every sphere of life, and shedding light on every grain of dust in God’s highway, so smooth below your carriage wheels, so rough beneath the tread of naked feet, bethink yourselves in looking on the swift descent of men who have lived in their own esteem, that there are scores of thousands breathing now, and breathing thick with painful toil, who in that high respect have never lived at all, nor had a chance of life! Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man’s neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul’s bright torch as fast as it is kindled! And, oh! ye Pharisees of the nineteen hundredth year of Christian knowledge, who soundingly appeal to human nature, see that it be human first. Take heed it has not been transformed, during your slumber and the sleep of generations, into the nature of the beasts.

“I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me as well as you. Come back harder? Of course I have come back harder. What else did you expect?”

“Harder to me! To her own dear mother!” cried the old woman.

“I don’t know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn’t,” she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and compressed lips, as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every softer feeling from her breast. “Listen, mother, to a word or two. If we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps. I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful enough, and have come back no better, you may swear. But have you been very dutiful to me?”

“I!” cried the old woman. “To my own gal! A mother dutiful to her own child!”

“It sounds unnatural, don’t it?” returned the daughter, looking coldly on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; “but I have thought of it sometimes, in the course of my lone years, till I have got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but it has always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and then—to pass away the time—whether no one ever owed any duty to me.”

Her mother sat mowing, and mumbling, and shaking her head, but whether angrily, or remorsefully, or in denial, or only in her physical infirmity, did not appear.

“There was a child called Alice Marwood,” said the daughter with a laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself, “born among poverty and neglect, and nurtured in it. Nobody taught her, nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her.”

“Nobody!” echoed the mother, pointing to herself and striking her breast.

“The only care she knew,” returned the daughter, “was to be beaten, and stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better without that. She lived in homes like this, and in the streets, with a crowd of little wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks out of this childhood. So much the worse for her. She had better have been hunted and worried to death for ugliness.”

“Go on! go on!” exclaimed the mother.

“She’ll soon have ended,” said the daughter. “There was a criminal called Alice Marwood—a girl still, but deserted and an outcast. And she was tried, and she was sentenced. And Lord, how the gentlemen in the court talked about it! and how grave the judge was on her duty, and on her having perverted the gifts of Nature—as if he didn’t know better than anybody there that they had been made curses to her!—and how he preached about the strong arm of the Law—so very strong to save her, when she was an innocent and helpless little wretch! and how solemn and religious it all was! I have thought of that many times since, to be sure!”

She folded her arms tightly on her breast, and laughed in a tone that made the howl of the old woman musical.

“So Alice Marwood was transported, mother,” she pursued, “and was sent to learn her duty where there was twenty times less duty, and more wickedness, and wrong, and infamy, than here. And Alice Marwood is come back a woman. Such a woman as she ought to be, after all this. In good time, there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and more strong arm, most likely, and there will be an end of her; but the gentlemen needn’t be afraid of being thrown out of work. There’s crowds of little wretches, boy and girl, growing up in any of the streets they live in, that’ll keep them to it till they’ve made their fortunes.”

“Charley, Charley!” said my guardian. “How old are you?”

“Over thirteen, sir,” replied the child.

“Oh! what a great age,” said my guardian. “What a great age, Charley!”“And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?” said my guardian.

“Yes, sir,” returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect confidence, “since father died.”

“And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley,” said my guardian, turning his face away for a moment, “how do you live?”

“Since my father died, sir, I’ve gone out to work. I’m out washing to-day.”

“God help you, Charley!” said my guardian. “You’re not tall enough to reach the tub!”

“In pattens I am, sir,” she said, quickly. “I’ve got a high pair as belonged to mother.”

“And when did mother die? Poor mother!”

“Mother died just after Emma was born,” said the child, glancing at the face upon her bosom. “Then father said I was to be as good a mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home, and did cleaning and nursing and washing, for a long time before I began to go out. And that’s how I know how; don’t you see, sir?”

“And do you often go out?”

“As often as I can,” said Charley, opening her eyes, and smiling, “because of earning sixpences and shillings!”

“And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?”

“To keep ’em safe, sir, don’t you see?” said Charley. “Mrs. Blinder comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and perhaps I can run in sometimes, and they can play, you know, and Tom ain’t afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?”

“No-o!” said Tom stoutly.

“When it comes on dark the lamps are lighted down in the court, and they show up here quite bright—almost quite bright. Don’t they, Tom?”

“Yes, Charley,” said Tom; “almost quite bright.”

But the Bigwig family broke out into violent family quarrels concerning what it was lawful to teach to this man’s children. Some of the family insisted on such a thing being primary and indispensable above all other things; and others of the family insisted on such another thing being primary and indispensable above all other things; and the Bigwig family, rent into factions, wrote pamphlets, held convocations, delivered charges, orations, and all varieties of discourses; impounded one another in courts Lay and courts Ecclesiastical; threw dirt, exchanged pummellings, and fell together by the ears in unintelligible animosity. Meanwhile, this man, in his short evening snatches at his fireside, saw the demon Ignorance arise there, and take his children to itself. He saw his daughter perverted into a heavy slatternly drudge; he saw his son go moping down the ways of low sensuality, to brutality and crime; he saw the dawning light of intelligence in the eyes of his babies so changing into cunning and suspicion, that he could have rather wished them idiots.

Traddles and I repaired to the prison where Mr. Creakle was powerful. It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old.

“The absence of the soul is far more terrible in a living man than in a dead one; and in this unfortunate being its noblest powers were wanting.”

“He has been called mad,” said my aunt. “I have a selfish pleasure in saying he has been called mad, or I should not have had the benefit of his society and advice for these last ten years and upward—in fact, ever since your sister, Betsy Trotwood, disappointed me.”

“So long as that?” I said.

“And nice people they were, who had the audacity to call him mad,” pursued my aunt. “Mr. Dick is a sort of distant connection of mine—it doesn’t matter how; I needn’t enter into that. If it hadn’t been for me, his own brother would have shut him up for life. That’s all.”

I am afraid it was hypocritical in me, but seeing that my aunt felt strongly on the subject, I tried to look as if I felt strongly too.

“A proud fool!” said my aunt. “Because his brother was a little eccentric—though he is not half so eccentric as a good many people—he didn’t like to have him visible about the house, and sent him away to some private asylum place; though he had been left to his particular care by their deceased father, who thought him almost a natural. And a wise man he must have been to think so! Mad himself, no doubt.”

Again, as my aunt looked quite convinced, I endeavoured to look quite convinced also.

“So I stepped in,” said my aunt, “and made him an offer. I said, ‘Your brother’s sane—a great deal more sane than you are, or ever will be, it is to be hoped. Let him have his little income, and come and live with me. I am not afraid of him; I am not proud; I am ready to take care of him, and shall not ill treat him as some people (besides the asylum folks) have done.’ After a good deal of squabbling,” said my aunt, “I got him; and he has been here ever since. He is the most friendly and amenable creature in existence; and as for advice!—but nobody knows what that man’s mind is, except myself.”

At South Boston, as it is called, in a situation excellently adapted for the purpose, several charitable institutions are clustered together. One of these is the State Hospital for the Insane; admirably conducted on those enlightened principles of conciliation and kindness, which twenty years ago would have been worse than heretical, and which have been acted upon with so much success in our own pauper asylum at Hanwell. “Evince a desire to show some confidence, and repose some trust, even in mad people,” said the resident physician, as we walked along the galleries, his patients flocking round us unrestrained. Of those who deny or doubt the wisdom of this maxim after witnessing its effects, if there be such people still alive, I can only say that I hope I may never be summoned as a juryman on a commission of lunacy whereof they are the subjects; for I should certainly find them out of their senses, on such evidence alone.

Each ward in this institution is shaped like a long gallery or hall, with the dormitories of the patients opening from it on either hand. Here they work, read, play at skittles, and other games; and, when the weather does not admit of their taking exercise out of doors, pass the day together. In one of these rooms, seated, calmly, and quite as a matter of course, among a throng of mad women, black and white, were the physician’s wife and another lady, with a couple of children. These ladies were graceful and handsome; and it was not difficult to perceive at a glance that even their presence there had a highly beneficial influence on the patients who were grouped about them.

Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a knife and fork; and in the midst of them sits the gentleman whose manner of dealing with his charges I have just described. At every meal, moral influence alone restrains the more violent among them from cutting the throats of the rest; but the effect of that influence is reduced to an absolute certainty, and is found, even as a means of restraint, to say nothing of it as a means of cure, a hundred times more efficacious than all the strait-waistcoats, fetters, and handcuffs, that ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty have manufactured since the creation of the world.