maker. There are helmets, by Foxglove, for
the same community. There are also the
well known little yellow "shoes and stockings."
There is veronica, there are the pink
blossoms of the wild geranium and the red
lychnis blossoms; there is lucerne, and there
is an odd orchis here and there. There is
agrimony; there are ambitious daisies
lengthening their stalks that they may show their
heads above the grass; there are the tiny blue
clusters of mouse ear; there is fern in abundance;
and there are the elegant grass blossoms
that would wave were there a breath of wind.
They are as still as painted grass blossoms,
because there is no breath of wind; the sun
shines steadily out of a deep blue sky, between
the high banks and the hedges, down into
the dusty lane.

Obedient to sign-post, which directs us to
the right if we desire to find the Philanthropic
Farm School, at Red Hill, we take
the appointed turning; thinking as we go,
How beautiful the blessed earth and sky, and
Is this really the world so ugly to us last
night with its courts and alleys, and its vice
and misery, and its ragged scholars, in whose
minds the wild flowers have been trampled
down, and nothing left but baleful weeds and
poisons?

It is more than seventy years since there
was established in this country a society
whose object was to divert children from the
paths of crime. We all know that the young
criminal is bred under the most pitiable
circumstances. Of eighty-two received in one
year at Red Hill, for example, twenty-seven
were orphans, either by the death or
transportation of their parents, or by being born
like brutes, and bred in ignorance of any
home. Nineteen were fatherless, and of these
almost all had step-fathers; twelve were
motherless, and most of these were furnished
with step-mothers, ignorant, brutal, and jealous.
Only twenty-four had both parents living; and
of these, who shall say how many had received
parental care?

Even the most anxious of poor parents must
be absent for some ten hours at their daily work,
while the child's school-time—when he has
been sent to school—can occupy but six hours
in the day. The streets are the child's
playground. If there be so much danger to the
best among the children of the very poor,
how is it with those bred in squalor, ignorance,
and vice? How is it with the wretched
untaught orphans, forced to calculate for
themselves the chances of existence, and to beg,
or steal, or die? O honorable friend, member
for Verbosity, your boy of fourteen—who
brought home his prize from school this
Midsummer, and told you with some glee of his
boyish escapades—is a fine fellow; in spite
of his juvenile offences he will grow up one
of these days, to be a noble, honest man. But,
had he been deprived of your assistance,
honorable friend, of your good thought on
his behalf and your wife's tender solicitude;
had your birthplace been a filthy fever-
breeding alley; had no voice of teacher
ever sounded in your ears; had you been
made a callous man by rubbing constantly
against the hardest side of society; had
your wife died of the gin with which she
sought to drown the despondent sense of
a most wretched existence; had you gone
to your daily work, leaving your boy in the
pestiferous alley; what would he, what could
he, have been! He might be the object of
parental care to the whole nation represented
by the State; since (to take the very lowest
ground), it is expensive to allow swarms of
young children to grow up yearly into a
mass of wild brutes, preying on society. The
State might teach and tend neglected children,
and compel those parents who are able, to
pay pence on their behalf. It might make a
parent answerable in some wholesome
measure for the crimes of a neglected child. It
might send its lifeboats out, to provide for all
an opportunity of rescue from the waves of
ignorance and vice before those waves had
overwhelmed the shipwrecked. These things
might be, but they are not. Your child, had
you been so much less respectable than you
are, would have been ragged, and would have
been pronounced by sitting magistrates, a
hardened little fellow; and the times he had
been before the sitting magistrates would have
been elaborately counted up; and he would
have been whipped so many times, to the
great comfort and profit of society, and not at
all to the mockery of reason, justice, and
humanity. He would have learned to swear,
and steal, and lie; he would have felt no sense
of obligation to society since society displayed
no sense of obligation towards him. The
British nation would have arrayed itself to
fight him; to whip him, imprison him,
transport him, and perhaps hang him. He, war
being declared, would feel at liberty to strike
the British nation where and when he could
—and he would most certainly do it.

Seventy years ago, a body of gentlemen
under the name of the Philanthropic Society
organised a method of receiving and assisting
criminal children, on a plan that very much
resembled the more recent methods practised
at Mettray.

"The mode of living," says the old report,
for the children received into the Philanthropic
in 1788-9, "is in distinct houses, as
separate families. A manufacturer has a
house for himself and his wife, if married,
and a certain number of wards, whom they
are to regard as their own children. In these
respects the design is to approach as nearly
as possible to common life." The institution
indeed began with a single child, who was
put out to nurse. It widened, and became
eventually incorporated, in the year 1806, by
Act of Parliament, and comprised within
the walls of a single building in St. George's
Fields under the name of the Philanthropic
Society.