CHAPTER XVII.
THE TRAINING OF POOR, NEGLECTED, AND DEFECTIVE CHILDREN.
It is a singular fact that humanity in its highest development so longneglected the poor, and the weak, and the defective. They were practicallyleft out of consideration by educators and philanthropists. The fact thatthey more than any others needed education and care was not seen clearlyenough to lead to definite plans for the amelioration of their misfortunesuntil the nineteenth century. Dickens must always have the honour of beingthe great English apostle of the poor--especially of neglected childhood.
He wrote in the Uncommercial Traveller:
I can find--_must_ find, whether I will or no--in the open streets, shameful instances of neglect of children, intolerable toleration of the engenderment of paupers, idlers, thieves, races of wretched and destructive cripples both in body and mind; a misery to themselves, a misery to the community, a disgrace to civilization, and an outrage on Christianity. I know it to be a fact as easy of demonstration as any sum in any of the elementary rules of arithmetic, that if the State would begin its work and duty at the beginning, and would with the strong hand take those children out of the streets while they are yet children, and wisely train them, it would make them a part of England's glory, not its shame--of England's strength, not its weakness--would raise good soldiers and sailors, and good citizens, and many great men out of the seeds of its criminal population; it would clear London streets of the most terrible objects they smite the sight with--myriads of little children who awfully reverse our Saviour's words, and are not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the Kingdom of Hell.
He sympathized with childhood on account of every form of coercion andabuse practised upon it by tyrannical, selfish, or ignorant adulthood,under the most favourable conditions; but his great heart was especiallytender toward the little ones who, in addition to coercion and abuse, andbad training by the selfish, the ignorant, and the careless, werecompelled to endure the terrible sufferings and deprivations of poverty.He was conscious not only of the material and physical evils to which thechildren of the very poor were exposed, but of the mental and spiritualbarrenness of their lives, and one of his most manifest educationalpurposes was to improve social conditions, to arouse the spirit of trulysympathetic brotherhood (not merely considerate altruism, but genuinebrotherhood) to place the poorest children in conditions that woulddevelop by experience the apperceptive centres of intellectual andspiritual growth, and to direct special attention to the urgent need ofeducation for the blind, the deaf, and the mentally defective.
No other American touched his heart and won his reverence quite sothoroughly as Dr. Howe, of Boston, who will undoubtedly be recognised asone of the greatest men yet produced by American civilization when men aretested by their purposes, and by their unselfish work for humanity inhitherto untrodden paths. After describing Dr. Howe's work for the blind,he reverently says: "There are not many persons, I hope and believe, who,after reading these passages, can ever hear that name with indifference."
Dickens charged on humanity, on society, the crime of making criminals. Hesaid with great force and truth in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit:
Nothing is more common in real life than a want of profitable reflection on the causes of many vices and crimes that awaken general horror. What is substantially true of families in this respect, is true of a whole commonwealth. As we sow, we reap. Let the reader go into the children's side of any prison in England, or, I grieve to add, of many workhouses, and judge whether those are monsters who disgrace our streets, people our hulks and penitentiaries, and overcrowd our penal colonies, or are creatures whom we have deliberately suffered to be bred for misery and ruin.
This thought was the motive that led him throughout his whole life to tryto arouse sympathetic interest of the most active kind in the conditionsand circumstances of the poor.
One of his most striking appeals to thoughtful people is made in MartinChuzzlewit. These profound words will always be worthy of careful study byteachers and reformers:
Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness and self-respect, innate in every sphere of life, and shedding light on every grain of dust in God's highway, so smooth below your carriage wheels, so rough beneath the tread of naked feet, bethink yourselves in looking on the swift descent of men who _have_ lived in their own esteem, that there are scores of thousands breathing now, and breathing thick with painful toil, who in that high respect have never lived at all, nor had a chance of life! Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled! And, oh! ye Pharisees of the nineteen hundredth year of Christian knowledge, who soundingly appeal to human nature, see that it be human first. Take heed it has not been transformed, during your slumber and the sleep of generations, into the nature of the beasts.
Dickens saw clearly the depravity of human nature, but he looked beyondthe depravity to its cause, and he found a natural cause for thedegradation, but not the cause that had been commonly assigned. He taughtthat the highest and holiest elements in human nature were the causes ofits swiftest deterioration when misused, perverted, or neglected.
Alice Marwood, in Dombey and Son, was introduced to teach parents andsociety in general the duties they owe to childhood, and to show how livesare wrecked by neglect and by a false use of power. When she returned, anoutcast, to her mother, and her mother upbraided her, the young womansaid:
"I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me as well as you. Come back harder? Of course I have come back harder. What else did you expect?"
"Harder to me! To her own dear mother!" cried the old woman.
"I don't know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn't," she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and compressed lips, as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every softer feeling from her breast. "Listen, mother, to a word or two. If we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps. I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful enough, and have come back no better, you may swear. But have you been very dutiful to me?"
"I!" cried the old woman. "To my own gal! A mother dutiful to her own child!"
"It sounds unnatural, don't it?" returned the daughter, looking coldly on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; "but I have thought of it sometimes, in the course of _my_ lone years, till I have got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but it has always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and then--to pass away the time--whether no one ever owed any duty to me."
Her mother sat mowing, and mumbling, and shaking her head, but whether angrily, or remorsefully, or in denial, or only in her physical infirmity, did not appear.
"There was a child called Alice Marwood," said the daughter with a laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself, "born among poverty and neglect, and nurtured in it. Nobody taught her, nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her."
"Nobody!" echoed the mother, pointing to herself and striking her breast.
"The only care she knew," returned the daughter, "was to be beaten, and stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better without that. She lived in homes like this, and in the streets, with a crowd of little wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks out of this childhood. So much the worse for her. She had better have been hunted and worried to death for ugliness."
"Go on! go on!" exclaimed the mother.
"She'll soon have ended," said the daughter. "There was a criminal called Alice Marwood--a girl still, but deserted and an outcast. And she was tried, and she was sentenced. And Lord, how the gentlemen in the court talked about it! and how grave the judge was on her duty, and on her having perverted the gifts of Nature--as if he didn't know better than anybody there that they had been made curses to her!--and how he preached about the strong arm of the Law--so very strong to save her, when she was an innocent and helpless little wretch! and how solemn and religious it all was! I have thought of that many times since, to be sure!"
She folded her arms tightly on her breast, and laughed in a tone that made the howl of the old woman musical.
"So Alice Marwood was transported, mother," she pursued, "and was sent to learn her duty where there was twenty times less duty, and more wickedness, and wrong, and infamy, than here. And Alice Marwood is come back a woman. Such a woman as she ought to be, after all this. In good time, there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and more strong arm, most likely, and there will be an end of her; but the gentlemen needn't be afraid of being thrown out of work. There's crowds of little wretches, boy and girl, growing up in any of the streets they live in, that'll keep them to it till they've made their fortunes."
Bleak House is one of the greatest of the educational works of Dickens.One of its chief aims was to arouse a sympathetic interest in the lives ofpoor children. The Neckett children, Charlotte, and Tom, and Emma,revealed a new world to many thousands of good people.
"Charley, Charley!" said my guardian. "How old are you?"
"Over thirteen, sir," replied the child.
"Oh! what a great age," said my guardian. "What a great age, Charley!"
"And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?" said my guardian.
"Yes, sir," returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect confidence, "since father died."
"And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley," said my guardian, turning his face away for a moment, "how do you live?"
"Since my father died, sir, I've gone out to work. I'm out washing to-day."
"God help you, Charley!" said my guardian. "You're not tall enough to reach the tub!"
"In pattens I am, sir," she said, quickly. "I've got a high pair as belonged to mother."
"And when did mother die? Poor mother!"
"Mother died just after Emma was born," said the child, glancing at the face upon her bosom. "Then father said I was to be as good a mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home, and did cleaning and nursing and washing, for a long time before I began to go out. And that's how I know how; don't you see, sir?"
"And do you often go out?"
"As often as I can," said Charley, opening her eyes, and smiling, "because of earning sixpences and shillings!"
"And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?"
"To keep 'em safe, sir, don't you see?" said Charley. "Mrs. Blinder comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and perhaps I can run in sometimes, and they can play, you know, and Tom ain't afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?"
"No-o!" said Tom stoutly.
"When it comes on dark the lamps are lighted down in the court, and they show up here quite bright--almost quite bright. Don't they, Tom?"
"Yes, Charley," said Tom; "almost quite bright."
The hearts must be hard that are not moved to a deeper and more practicalinterest in the children of the poor by this pathetic story, and others ofa kindred character which Dickens told over and over again for theChristian world to study. And the study led to feeling and thought andco-operative action.
The fruits of these wonderful stories are the splendid homes, andorganizations for children, and the laws to protect them from cruelty byparents or teachers, or employers, and the free public schools to educatethem, and the joy, and happiness, and freedom, that are taking the placeof the sorrow, and tears, and coercion of the time when Dickens began hisnoble work.
The tragic story of poor Jo illustrated the poverty, the ignorance, thedestitution, the hopelessness, the barrenness, and the dreadfulenvironment of a London street boy. The world has done much better since,as Dickens prophesied it would do, and the good work is going on. Hundredsof thousands of the poor Joes of London are now in the public schools ofLondon alone of whom the Christian philanthropy of the world thoughtlittle till Dickens told his stories.
In Nobody's Story Dickens returns to his special purpose of changing theattitude of civilization toward the education of the poor. The Bigwigsrepresent society, and "the man" means the poor man.
But the Bigwig family broke out into violent family quarrels concerning what it was lawful to teach to this man's children. Some of the family insisted on such a thing being primary and indispensable above all other things; and others of the family insisted on such another thing being primary and indispensable above all other things; and the Bigwig family, rent into factions, wrote pamphlets, held convocations, delivered charges, orations, and all varieties of discourses; impounded one another in courts Lay and courts Ecclesiastical; threw dirt, exchanged pummellings, and fell together by the ears in unintelligible animosity. Meanwhile, this man, in his short evening snatches at his fireside, saw the demon Ignorance arise there, and take his children to itself. He saw his daughter perverted into a heavy slatternly drudge; he saw his son go moping down the ways of low sensuality, to brutality and crime; he saw the dawning light of intelligence in the eyes of his babies so changing into cunning and suspicion, that he could have rather wished them idiots.
Dickens objected to a certain kind of sentimentality exhibited in his daytoward criminals, and draws a very suggestive picture full of elementsfor psychological study in David Copperfield, in which he makes the brutalschoolmaster Creakle a very considerate Middlesex magistrate, with anunfailing system for a quick and effective method of converting thewickedest scoundrels into the most submissive, Scripture-quoting saints bysolitary confinement. Dickens did not approve of the system, and he didnot approve either of the plan of the spending of so much money by thestate in erecting splendid buildings for criminals, while the honest poorwere in hovels, and especially while the state allowed the boys and girls,through neglect, to be transformed into criminals by thousands every year.Dickens would have made criminals earn their own living, and he urged theestablishment of industrial schools for the boys and girls of the streets,so that they might become respectable, intelligent, self-reliant,law-abiding citizens instead of criminals.
David said:
Traddles and I repaired to the prison where Mr. Creakle was powerful. It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old.
As usual with great reformers, the philanthropists of his own day refusedto accept the theories of Dickens, but succeeding generations adoptedthem. The reforms for which he pleaded began to be practised so soonbecause he winged his thought with living appeals to the deepest, truestfeelings of the human heart.
Dickens said truly of Barnaby Rudge:
"The absence of the soul is far more terrible in a living man than in a dead one; and in this unfortunate being its noblest powers were wanting."
He pleaded again for those who are weak-minded in Mr. Dick's case in DavidCopperfield. Mr. Dick was evidently introduced into the story to show theeffect of kind treatment on those who are defective in intellect. Theinsane were flogged and put in strait-jackets in the time of Dickens. Histe
aching is now the practice of the civilized world. The insane are kindlytreated, and weak-minded children are taught in good schools by the bestteachers that can be obtained for them.
Betsy Trotwood, David's aunt, was an embodiment of a good heart unitedwith an eminently practical head. She did not talk about religion, as didthe Murdstones, but she showed her religious life in good, reasonable,self-sacrificing, helpful living. David asked her for an explanation ofMr. Dick's case.
"He has been _called_ mad," said my aunt. "I have a selfish pleasure in saying he has been called mad, or I should not have had the benefit of his society and advice for these last ten years and upward--in fact, ever since your sister, Betsy Trotwood, disappointed me."
"So long as that?" I said.
"And nice people they were, who had the audacity to call him mad," pursued my aunt. "Mr. Dick is a sort of distant connection of mine--it doesn't matter how; I needn't enter into that. If it hadn't been for me, his own brother would have shut him up for life. That's all."
I am afraid it was hypocritical in me, but seeing that my aunt felt strongly on the subject, I tried to look as if I felt strongly too.
"A proud fool!" said my aunt. "Because his brother was a little eccentric--though he is not half so eccentric as a good many people--he didn't like to have him visible about the house, and sent him away to some private asylum place; though he had been left to his particular care by their deceased father, who thought him almost a natural. And a wise man _he_ must have been to think so! Mad himself, no doubt."
Again, as my aunt looked quite convinced, I endeavoured to look quite convinced also.
"So I stepped in," said my aunt, "and made him an offer. I said, 'Your brother's sane--a great deal more sane than you are, or ever will be, it is to be hoped. Let him have his little income, and come and live with me. _I_ am not afraid of him; _I_ am not proud; _I_ am ready to take care of him, and shall not ill treat him as some people (besides the asylum folks) have done.' After a good deal of squabbling," said my aunt, "I got him; and he has been here ever since. He is the most friendly and amenable creature in existence; and as for advice!--but nobody knows what that man's mind is, except myself."
Dickens was greatly delighted with the asylums of the United States, andhe strongly advocated the adoption in England of American methods oftreating the insane. He says, in American Notes:
At South Boston, as it is called, in a situation excellently adapted for the purpose, several charitable institutions are clustered together. One of these is the State Hospital for the Insane; admirably conducted on those enlightened principles of conciliation and kindness, which twenty years ago would have been worse than heretical, and which have been acted upon with so much success in our own pauper asylum at Hanwell. "Evince a desire to show some confidence, and repose some trust, even in mad people," said the resident physician, as we walked along the galleries, his patients flocking round us unrestrained. Of those who deny or doubt the wisdom of this maxim after witnessing its effects, if there be such people still alive, I can only say that I hope I may never be summoned as a juryman on a commission of lunacy whereof they are the subjects; for I should certainly find them out of their senses, on such evidence alone.
Each ward in this institution is shaped like a long gallery or hall, with the dormitories of the patients opening from it on either hand. Here they work, read, play at skittles, and other games; and, when the weather does not admit of their taking exercise out of doors, pass the day together. In one of these rooms, seated, calmly, and quite as a matter of course, among a throng of mad women, black and white, were the physician's wife and another lady, with a couple of children. These ladies were graceful and handsome; and it was not difficult to perceive at a glance that even their presence there had a highly beneficial influence on the patients who were grouped about them.
Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a knife and fork; and in the midst of them sits the gentleman whose manner of dealing with his charges I have just described. At every meal, moral influence alone restrains the more violent among them from cutting the throats of the rest; but the effect of that influence is reduced to an absolute certainty, and is found, even as a means of restraint, to say nothing of it as a means of cure, a hundred times more efficacious than all the strait-waistcoats, fetters, and handcuffs, that ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty have manufactured since the creation of the world.
How much those benighted teachers who so tragically ask "What _can_ you dowith bad boys, if you do _not_ use corporal punishment?" might learn fromthe last sentence!
Blinded by old ideals, these teachers whip away, admitting that they failto reform many of the best boys, and quieting their consciences with thehorrible thought that the evil course was the natural one for the boys,and that they are not responsible for their blighted lives. They comfortthemselves with the thought that it is God's business, and if he made aboy so bad that flogging would not reform him, they at any rate are freefrom blame, because they "have beaten, and beaten, and beaten him, and itdid him no good." Having beaten him, and beaten him, and beaten him, theyrest contented with the sure conviction that they have faithfully donetheir duty; and when, perchance, the poor boy becomes a criminal, theysolemnly say without a blush or a pang: "I knew he would come to a badend, but I am so thankful that I did my duty to him."
Ignominious failure to save the brave boys who are not cowardly enough tobe deterred from doing wrong by beating has taught nothing to someteachers. Even yet they placidly beat on, and get angry if they arerequested to try freedom as a substitute for coercion in the training ofbeings created in God's image. They even question the sanity and thetheology of those who dare to doubt the efficiency of the sacred rod. Theydo not deem it possible that by studying the child and their own higherpowers they could find easier, pleasanter, and infinitely more successfulmethods of guiding a boy to a true, strong life than by beating, andbeating, and beating him.
The keepers of asylums in the time of Dickens were equally severe on thewise friends of the insane. They honestly believed that terrible evilswould necessarily result from giving greater freedom to the afflictedpatients in asylums. Dickens took the side of freedom and common sense,and the strait-jackets, and handcuffs, and fetters have been taken off,and, _even as a means of restraint_, kindness and freedom have done betterwork than all the coercive fetters that "ignorance, prejudice, and crueltyhave manufactured since the creation of the world."
So all teachers who have grown wise enough have found that kindness andfreedom are much better even as restraining agents, and infinitely betterin the development of true, independent, positive, progressive charactersthan all the coercive terrors of rod, rule, strap, rawhide, or any form ofcruelty ever practised on helpless childhood by ignorance, prejudice, andperverted theology since the creation of the world.
In American Notes Dickens gave a long description of Laura Bridgmanwritten by Dr. Howe, and showed his intense interest in what was then anew movement in favour of the education of the blind.
Speaking of Laura Bridgman, Dickens himself wrote:
The thought occurred to me as I sat down in another room before a girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell, and nearly so of taste; before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and hope, and power of goodness and affection inclosed within her delicate frame, and but one outward sense--the sense of touch. There she was before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that an immortal soul might be awakened.
Long before I looked upon her the help had come. Her face was radiant with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands, was bound about her he
ad, whose intellectual capacity and development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and its broad open brow; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and simplicity; the work she had knitted lay beside her; her writing book was on the desk she leaned upon. From the mournful ruin of such bereavement there had slowly risen up this gentle, tender, guileless, grateful-hearted being.
The touching story of Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter was intended toarouse interest in blind children.
Doctor Marigold should be one of the best beloved of all the beautifulcharacters of Dickens. If any kind of language could awaken an intenseinterest in the education of deaf-mutes, the story of the dear old CheapJack must surely do it.
The sad picture of the cruel treatment of his own little Sophy by hermother; of her dying on his shoulder while he was selling his wares to thecrowd, whispering fondly to her between his jokes; and the suicide of themother, when she afterward saw another woman beating her child, and heardthe child cry piteously, "Don't beat me! Oh, mother, mother,mother!"--these prepare the heart for full appreciation of the tender,considerate, and intelligent treatment of the deaf-mute child adopted byDoctor Marigold in Sophy's place.
I went to that Fair as a mere civilian, leaving the cart outside the town, and I looked about the back of the Vans while the performing was going on, and at last, sitting dozing against a muddy cart wheel, I come upon the poor girl who was deaf and dumb. At the first look I might almost have judged that she had escaped from the Wild Beast Show; but at the second I thought better of her, and thought that if she was more cared for and more kindly used she would be like my child. She was just the same age that my own daughter would have been, if her pretty head had not fell down upon my shoulder that unfortunate night.
It was happy days for both of us when Sophy and me began to travel in the cart. I at once gave her the name of Sophy, to put her ever toward me in the attitude of my own daughter. We soon made out to begin to understand one another, through the goodness of the Heavens, when she knowed that I meant true and kind by her. In a very little time she was wonderful fond of me. You have no idea what it is to have anybody wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the better of me.
You'd have laughed--or the rewerse--it's according to your disposition--if you could have seen me trying to teach Sophy. At first I was helped--you'd never guess by what--milestones. I got some large alphabets in a box, all the letters separate on bits of bone, and say we was going to WINDSOR; I gave her those letters in that order, and then at every milestone I showed her those same letters in that same order again, and pointed toward the abode of royalty. Another time I give her CART, and then chalked the same upon the cart. Another time I give her DOCTOR MARIGOLD, and hung a corresponding inscription outside my waistcoat. People that met us might stare a bit and laugh, but what did _I_ care if she caught the idea? She caught it after long patience and trouble, and then we did begin to get on swimmingly, I believe you! At first she was a little given to consider me the cart, and the cart the abode of royalty, but that soon wore off.
The way she learned to understand any look of mine was truly surprising. When I sold of a night, she would sit in the cart, unseen by them outside, and would give a eager look into my eyes when I looked in, and would hand me straight the precise article or articles I wanted. And then she would clap her hands, and laugh for joy. And as for me, seeing her so bright, and remembering what she was when I first lighted on her, starved and beaten and ragged, leaning asleep against the muddy cart wheel, it give me such heart that I gained a greater height of reputation than ever.
This happiness went on in the cart till she was sixteen years old. By which time I began to feel not satisfied that I had done my whole duty by her, and to consider that she ought to have better teaching than I could give her. It drew a many tears on both sides when I commenced explaining my views to her; but what's right is right, and you can't neither by tears nor laughter do away with its character.
So I took her hand in mine, and I went with her one day to the Deaf and Dumb Establishment in London, and when the gentleman come to speak to us, I says to him: "Now, I'll tell you what I'll do with you, sir. I am nothing but a Cheap Jack, but of late years I have laid by for a rainy day notwithstanding. This is my only daughter (adopted), and you can't produce a deafer nor a dumber. Teach her the most that can be taught her in the shortest separation that can be named--state the figure for it--and I am game to put the money down. I won't bate you single farthing, sir, but I'll put down the money here and now, and I'll thankfully throw you in a pound to take it. There!" The gentleman smiled, and then, "Well, well," says he, "I must first know what she has learned already. How do you communicate with her?" Then I showed him, and she wrote in printed writing many names of things and so forth; and we held some sprightly conversation, Sophy and me, about a little story in a book which the gentleman showed her, and which she was able to read. "This is most extraordinary," says the gentleman; "is it possible that you have been her only teacher?" "I have been her only teacher, sir," I says, "besides herself." "Then," says the gentleman, and more acceptable words was never spoke to me, "you're a clever fellow, and a good fellow." This he makes known to Sophy, who kisses his hands, claps her own, and laughs and cries upon it.
"Now, Marigold, tell me what more do you want your adopted daughter to know?"
"I want her, sir, to be cut off from the world as little as can be, considering her deprivations, and therefore to be able to read whatever is wrote with perfect ease and pleasure."
No one ever read this story and its delightful closing without being moredeeply interested in deaf-mutes and their education.
All the children, especially poor and defective children, should be taughthow much they owe to Dickens, that they might reverently love his memory.
One of the most awful pictures shown to Scrooge by the Phantom was thepicture of the two "wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserablechildren."
They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand toward the city. "Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end!"
Dickens bravely fought the battle against the enemies of the children, andhelped to win the grandest victories of Christian civilization.
THE END.
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