down stairs; some breaking their backs, others their legs or arms;
and to this cause alone, perhaps, may be traced a vast number of the
cripples that daily appear as mendicants in our streets. When the
poor parents return from their daily labour, they sometimes have the
mortification of finding that one, or probably two, of their children,
are gone to an hospital; which of course makes them unhappy, and
unfits them for going through their daily labour. This dead weight,
which is continually on the minds of parents, is frequently the cause
of their being unable to please their employers, and the consequence
sometimes is, they are thrown out of work altogether; whereas, if
they were certain that their children were taken care of, they would
proceed with their daily labour cheerfully, and be enabled to give
more satisfaction to their employers than they otherwise can do.

Other parents I have known, who, when obliged to go out, have locked
their children in a room to prevent them from getting into the street,
or falling down stairs, and who have taken every precaution, as
they imagined, to protect their children; but the little creatures,
perhaps, after fretting and crying for hours at being thus confined,
have ventured to get up to the window, in order to see what was
passing in the street, when one, over-reaching itself, has fallen out
and been killed on the spot. A gentleman said, at a public meeting at
Exeter, when referring to this subject, "I have myself, twice in my
life, nearly occasioned the death of children. In one instance, a
child left to itself, ran out of the hedge by the road-side; I was
fortunately able to stop, and found the child, unconscious of its
escape, raising its hands to the reins of the horse. And on another
occasion, my horse threw a child down, and I had but just time to pull
up, and prevent the wheels from passing over the infant's head." And
it was stated in a Bristol paper, that in the short space of _one