that watchful eye of his could, and does,
pick them out as he walks slowly on—the old
gentleman with the gold spectacles, who trots,
rather than walks, along the street, and the
good-natured matron, who knows something
about children, and who is as likely as not to
say, as she gives them her alms, "Do, for goodness
sake, take that poor child home; it looks perishing
with cold and hunger!"

Of this man who makes a wretched living out
of the misery of a set of helpless children, there
is no hope. Nothing can be done with him.
The badge of roguery, idleness, vagrancy, is
marked upon him as plainly as if he had been
branded. If he were not doing this mean and
contemptible thing, he would be doing some
other thing equally contemptible and equally
mean. I saw him not long since practising a
branch of his trade which was a little different
from that which has been described above. On
this occasion—it was one of the coldest days of
the past cold season—he was sitting on a doorstep,
and had one child only with him, on which
he was lavishing a prodigious amount of
exaggerated and demonstrative affection, affecting
to kiss and fondle the wretched little creature
which he had got hold of, in an overdone and
unnatural manner which it was painful to see.
And the child would not have it, shrinking from
his caresses with fear and aversion, and looking
in the faces of the passers-by as if praying for
deliverance from this display of affection, which
it felt to be at once hateful and unintelligible.

Is that appeal for deliverance, which is not
the less powerful because it is mute, and which
every one of these children, employed to move
our feelings of compassion, makes to every
human being who passes by, to be made always
in vain? To attempt to do anything with the
parents, or rather with those who profess to be
the parents, of these little creatures would
probably be an utter waste of time and money.
Their habits are formed. When grown-up people
have passed a certain number of years in doing
wrong, the chances are terribly against their
taking suddenly to virtuous courses and
beginning to do right. Such a result can only be
brought about by some great change taking
place in the mind and character of the
individual who is to be reformed. It must emanate
from within, and such emanations are rare in
the extreme. But with children it is different.
With them anything may be done. You have
in your hands a certain amount of raw material
with which you may do almost what you choose.
As you deal with it, so the result will be. Let
it alone, and it will probably go wrong. Leave
it in bad hands, and it will certainly do so. Is
it wise, then, so to leave it? Taking the lowest
ground, appealing only to expediency, let us
ask whether it is judicious to leave the
vagabond children of London to their fate. What
a beginning is this for a human being. What
an entrance into life. What a training in
roguery and lying. What sort of Ianguage are
these children in the habit of hearing? What
sort of precepts are inculcated by those who
surround them? What sort of an example is
set them by the men and women with whom
they habitually come in contact? Surely it is
bad policy—still keeping, be it observed, on low
ground—to leave unmolested these nurseries,
as they may be called, where plants of the most
poisonous kind, or at best only noxious weeds,
are carefully cultivated. Leaving out of sight
the present bodily suffering, and the future
mental undoing, which must inevitably result
from the letting alone system, I would venture
to maintain that, as a matter of policy, it is just
a piece of as bad management as can be
conceived to allow this state of things to remain as
it is.

That something might be done to change
radically the prospects of these younger
members of our vagabond population, there can be
no doubt. The system of making use of children
as agents of mendicity is a tangible evil, and
one which is not incapable of remedy. Once
let it become an illegal act so to use them, and
the mischief is at an end. This is not a kind of
offence which could be carried on in secret.
The very nature of such misdoing implies
publicity. The man who begs by means of children,
and through their sufferings appeals to public
compassion, naturally selects the most public
situation which he can find for the exercise of
his calling, and is at the mercy of the first
policeman in whose beat he is found pursuing
his vocation.

Let us hope, then, that we have seen the last
of that miserable group to which the attention
of every resident in London has been drawn so
often. Let us hope that our manager who
knows his public so well, and how to appeal to
their weak side, may in time come to be
deprived at least of the younger members of his
troupe, and that his career for the future may
be a solitary one. If that slow progress of his
through the mud is an unavoidable part of a
London winter, at least let us hope that such
progress may be made alone. If his voice is
still to be lifted up in our streets—if it is still
inevitable that we should from time to time be
afflicted by the sound of his itinerant psalmody—
at least let us hope that this wretched creature
may from this time be allowed to execute a solo
movement only, and that that shrill chorus of
children's voices maybe henceforth conspicuous
by its absence. The sound of children's voices
is, no doubt, a pleasant one, and it is especially
pleasant to hear them sing together; but we do
not care to hear them under such circumstances
as those which have been detailed above, and
we shall most of us consider that the loss of
their voices in such street chorus-singing as we
have been lately considering is a decided gain.

In a mercantile point of view that loss will,
no doubt, be a serious one; for utterly irrational
as it seems, it is yet a fact that various well-
meaning individuals will bestow an alms upon
that ruffianly child-proprietor, simply for the
sake of the miserable children who accompany
him, and this although the well-meaning
individuals in question must, know perfectly well,
or would know if they chose to think, that these
unfortunate infants will not only be none the