CRUELTY TO CHILDREN.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XIII, Issue 4024, 1 February 1892, Page 3

CRUELTY TO CHILDREN.

Deplorable stato of Affairs.

There is in England, Merry England— England home of the brave and the free, a society for the Prevention of cruelty to Children, The Sooiety coinpletod the second year of its existoilco in May last, In that period it dealt with 10,169 cases of Cruelty to children. A large number of the abominations which it is the Society's duty to expose are far too abominable for reproduction in these columns. Bore, however, are a few samples by no means the worst, in the experience of the Society's officers :

A boy, thirteen months old, was insured for £B. He weighed 161b instead of 191b. This skeleton child was fouod sitting in the fireplace trying to eat cinders, Its bed was like iarmyard dung. The parents were a couple of sois, and they had three other children also insured. Another child of ten months had been insured by its mother and put out to "nurse." It was described as like a " skinned rabbit." A girl whoso father earned £2 weekly was kept in a garret without bed or bedding throughout the winter. Sometimes she was locked, without food, formanyhoursinacoal celler sft, The bannister of the stairs was gnawed by the starving child's teeth. A. ;boy of fourteen year oftended his father by taking a piece of toast off a plate, The Bend felled him to the ground and kicked him in the belly, The boy crawled under the bed, whither the father followed, and fixing his ceeth in the lad's thigh, dragged him out as a terrier would a rat, In another case a baby-farmer lived in a house in London rented at X6O a year, One of the victims, five year old, could neither stand nor speak. She lay in a semi-conscious state on a dirty pile of bedding; she only weighed half the proper weight j and she gave a savage yell when food was shown to her, although nothing else could attract her attention. The mother of another child applied mustard oil to the wounds caused by her ill-treatment. Another was hung by a slip-strap to a hook in the ceiling until black in the face and unconscious. Others were immersed naked in a freezing tank out of doors, burned in the mouth with a red-hot poker for complaining of hunger, had their medical Btrap3,bandßges,Bplints, and poultices removed. It should be explained that the lives of many of these tortured and murdered children are insured, and, further, that their torturers are by no means destitute and outcast. In upwards of 3,000 cases the minimum wage of the responsible parent or guardian was 27s Gd. And these things, and iudiscribably worse things, happen in a land where compulsory education has been m rogue for 21 years I— Catholic Times,