WEEPING FOR THE CHILDREN.

Feilding Star, Volume V, Issue 46, 19 April 1884, Page 3

WEEPING FOR THE CHILDREN.

' ... (advertisement.) Rachel weeping for the children, Lifting up her hauds on nigh, Wcepins; for the little children With a great and bitter cry. For the children of the drunkards In the city's loathesome dens — Drunken fathers, drunken mothers, Bound in Satan's fiery chains. For their helpless, ragged children — Poorest of the city poor — Shivering in the bitter winter, Crushed with want and hunger sore. To the drink shop at the corner Sent, with bare and bleeding feet, For tiie ali-devouring poison, While they have no fire, no meat. Little broken-hearted victims Of a cruel mother's siu, Of a maddened father's anger, Gendered by the fire within. Driven, hounded, bruised and beaten,| Perished witli neglect and dirt ; By the slum breath, fever laden, All their wasted lives begirt. Rachel weeping for the children, And will not be comforted ; For the iittl« children .".re not, And their childhood's life is dead. Bred among the city's vilest, In the drunkard's lot of shame ; 'Mid the slum birds and the jail birds, They can only be the same. So they live and die as panpers, The most helpless paupers they ; So they fill our hulks and prisons — Our most helpless birds of prey. Rachel weeping for the children, Let hs join her, heart and hand, Till the drink plague shall bp banished From the little children's land. And the children shall look upwards, Sweet and simple, pure and good, Full of life and health and joyance, As their Saviour meant they should. — Temperance Herald.