Russian "Angel Factories."

Manawatu Herald, Volume III, Issue III, 1 August 1890, Page 2

Russian " Angel Factories."

A HORRIBLE REVELATION. A very startling account of the prevalence ot infanticide appears in the London Daily Telegraph. A St Petersburg correspondent of that journal says that wild excitement has been aroused in some parti of the Empire by the discovery of what the press call " angel factories "—establishments in which " newborn babes are systematically starred to death for a moderate charge, in order to spare their parents the shame or the trouble of acknowledging their existence and bringing them up. The writer asserts that wholesale infanticide is incomparably more widespread in modern times than ever it was in antiquity. The existence of two immense foundling asy urns in St Petersburg and Moscow, cays this correspondent, rather iocreaies. than paliates the evil : — " A numerous profession exists in the provin ea of Russia, the members of which are needy women, endowed with an instinctive intuition enabling them to sceut out all those mothers who desire to get their children put in the Moscow or the St Petersburg asylum for foundlings. They collect the little waifs, pack them in baskets (six or eight in one basket), itow them away under the seats of the third'class railway carriages, along with eggs, but er, rags, and refuse, and those who survive this first life's journey are deposited at the front gates of the foundling aslyums; eighty eight per cent of these are in due time carted out at the back gates in the shape of little corpses. Now, why, these unfortunate mothers ask ; should these little babies he wantonly tortured in a railw ay carriage, and money paid to the scheming, heartless women who torture them, and kilt them in a lingering manner, when they can be finished off more mercifully, and more or lessjlegally.atfar ;esß expense and, in time, the thought becomes the deed, and we read at one breakfast of 885 cases of child murder that came before the courts in 1888, of 200 cases of children dying from deliberate exposure to hunger, of " Angel factories " discovered last Autumn in Warsaw, and on.y wait to get up our horror til' Skoob linsky organizes the thing on business principles, and makes it a iourishing enterprise •' Skooblinsky is the name of a woman lately arrested in Wars <w for the system* atic uiurder of babies. The writer states that a considerable proportion of the-e children " ilursed into angels " in the Foundling Hospitals, " belong to parents who are married and have a goodly share of the material comforts of life."