Baby Farming.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5326, 2 August 1895, Page 2

Baby Farming.

The case of the wretched woman Dean, who now lies under' sentence of death, is one that illustrates what dark deeds are still possible in a civilised land, deßpite the utmost safeguards that , humanity can devise for the proper treat* ment of children. In England, aa here,. there is a stringent law for the protection' of infant life, and yet frequent disclosures Bhow how that law is evaded and suffering inflicted upon helpless atoms of humanity. At the last Quarter Sessions at Somerset,, a man named Joseph Bailey and his wife were charged with keeping an unregie- ; tered baby farm. It was proved that they had a number of children under one year j old, whom they had taken from their f parents, agreeing, for sums of from £8 to j JBIS to take and provide for each child for , the term of its natural life. These eonj tracts had a way of tn>ning out profitably j for the baby farmers, for two of the ', children were shown to have died within a ' fortnight after their reception into the I establishment. la this case, as in that at Invercargill, the female prisoner made a pretence of great afieotion for the children —offering at the outset to adopt them . "almost for nothing," but ending by ! taking as much money as Bhe could get* '^Neglect was clearly established against the I 'Baileys, but there was no evidence of that neglect having caused death, so they got 'off with four months* hard labour each— a sentence whioh a London newspaper characterised as " ridiculously inadequate."' The female prisoner was proved to hare J6lOOO invested in freehold property, so that she had evidently found the business a lucrative one. The prosecution was at the instance of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and it is undoubted that lnuoh good work is done by that Bociety in protecting child-life from the unnatural treatment even of parents. The Rev Benjamin Waugh, secretary of that society, in making his annual appeal {or funds lately, aßked the British public to imagine a procession of 100,000 children a» representing those whom the society hag helped during the ten years of its existence. He said:— "The first 25,437 ara sufferers from violence — from boots, crockery, pans, abovels, afcrape, cope, ; thongs, pokers, fire, boiling water, any , weapon which came to the reckless and vengeful hands which owned them— braked, cut, burned, scalded, plastered,. bandaged. Following these come 62,887 | sufferers from neglect and starvation— 1 ( shivering, ragged, nigh naked, pale, limp, j feeble, faint, dizzy, puny, sinking, famine* j Stricken, dying — many carried in the armß |of nurßea of infirmary and hospital. At the close of these would come 712 funerals, . where ill-treatment ended fatally.' Still ! following come 12,668 little things exposed j to suffering to draw the lazy and cruel . charity of the street. Then come 4460 ! pitiable girl-child victims of vice, and | after them 3205 little slaves of improper ( and hurtful employment and dangerous performances, and child monstrosities in travelling shows. The imagined procee- ' sion is sixty miles long, and would take ' twenty-four hours to pass." ! That tha natural protectors of ohil- ( dren sometimes give way to fiendish cruelty in the treatment of their ' little ones iB a fact only too well estab* lished. In an article that be wrote for . the Contemporary Review, Cardinal Man- • ning gave a list of cases of this kind, 1 compiled from the public records J which iB sufficient to make any ■ humane person blush for his species. The [ article was appropriately entitled, "The ' Child of the English Savage," and here > are a few of the foots which were cited in ' support of that definition:— One mother laid her baby close to the fire to get rid 'of it through thirst ; another put hers in a draught to kill it with cold; a third immersed a dying boy in a tub of cold water ; a fourth beat a dying child out ofi his bed to help her to wash, and then knocked him down because he oould not. One sweet matron made a poker red hot, i gagged her boy, and then burned him | with it. A father rasped the skin off bis child's boneß at all the joints and knuckles. j The case of Mrs Montague is a recent one. ( She tied up her child in the dark, and the innocent died of terror and suffocation com- ' bined. . A case wbb tried at Manchester only J a few week ago, in which a married woman ' named Munro was charged with burning j her three-year-old daughter with a red-hot < poker. Because Bhe did not like the child, the woman in a fit of passion took the ' poker red-hot from the fire and terribly i burned her in four different places. When accused, Bhe said she had done it and ' would do it again. The magistrate reI marked that it was the worst case he had 1 ever known, and imposed a sentence of six months' imprisonment on the unnatural I mother. Theße and Other inoidents that might be adduced strengthen the conviction that the Stats must increasingly take upon itself the care and supervision of the young. The occurrence of Buoh tragedies as those for which Mrs Dean is doomed to suffer suggests that we shall have to apply a more stringent law for the preservation of infant life, which may take the form o£ forbidding baby farming altogether, save in recognised orphanages.