suffering," in Dickens's words, "preside over their birth, rock their
wretched cradles, nail down their little coffins, and fill their unknown
graves." More than one-half of the inmates of our Great Ormond Street
Hospital for Sick Children are sent there by vice. But would to God it
were only innocent suffering that is inflicted on the children of our
land. Alas! alas! when I first began my work, a ward in a large London
penitentiary, I found, was set apart for degraded children! Or take that
one brief appalling statement in the record of ten years of work--1884
to 1894--issued by a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
In the classification of the various victims it is stated that the
society had dealt with 4460 pitiable child victims of debauchery! Alas
for our England, and the debasement which a low moral standard for men
has made possible in our midst! And, judging by the absence of proper
legal protection and the extraordinarily low age of consent adopted by
some of the States of the Union, I fear things are not much better in
America.

One of our sweetest poets, Charles Tennyson Turner, in an exquisite
sonnet on a three-year-old child being presented with a toy globe, has
portrayed the consecration of a child's innocence, bathing the world
itself in its baptismal dew:

"She patted all the world; old empires peep'd
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers."

And when at length they turn "her sweet unlearned eye" "on our own
isle," she utters a little joyous cry:

"Oh yes, I see it! Letty's home is there!