# Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1838/Infanticide in Madagascar

77
* INFANTICIDE IN MADAGASCAR.
* Artist: H. Melville - Engraved by: J. Redaway
INFANTICIDE IN MADAGASCAR.
A luxury of summer green  Is on the southern plain,
And water-flags, with dewy screen,
 Protect the ripening grain.
Upon the sky is not a cloud
 To mar the golden glow,
Only the palm-tree is allowed  To fling its shade below.
And silvery, mid its fertile brakes,  The winding river glides,
And every ray in heaven makes
 Its mirror of its tides.
And yet it is a place of death—
 A place of sacrifice;
Heavy with childhood’s parting breath—  Weary with childhood’s cries.
The mother takes her little child,  Its face is like her own;
The cradle of her choice is wild—
 Why is it left alone? The trampling of the buffalo  Is heard among the reeds,
And sweeps around the carrion-crow
 That amid carnage feeds.
Oh! outrage upon mother Earth
 To yonder azure sky; A destined victim from its birth,  The child is left to die.
We shudder that such crimes disgrace
 E’en yonder savage strand;
Alas! and hath such crime no trace
 Within our English land?
Pause, ere we blame the savage code  That such strange horror keeps;
Perhaps within her sad abode  The mother sits and weeps,
And thinks how oft those eyelids smiled,  Whose close she may not see,
And says, "Oh, would to God, my child,  I might have died for thee!"
Such law of bloodshed to annul  Should be the Christian’s toil;
May not such law be merciful,
 To that upon our soil?
Better the infant eyes should close
 Upon the first sweet breath,
Than weary for their last repose,
 A living life in death!
Look on the children of our poor,  On many an English child:
Better that it had died secure
 By yonder river wild.
Flung careless on the waves of life,
 From childhood’s earliest time,
They struggle, one perpetual strife,
 With hunger and with crime.
Look on the crowded prison-gate—  Instructive love and care
In early life had saved the fate
 That waits on many there.
Cold, selfish, shunning care and cost,
 The poor are left unknown; I say, for every soul thus lost,  We answer with our own.
The Malagassy regard certain days as propitious to every procedure resulting from the events of those days, and other days as the reverse. This delusive influence inculcates the belief, that all born on these inauspicious days will be its subjects and agents through life, and superinduces a conviction, that to spare and nurse the unhappy infants, born on such days, would be to cherish sorcerers, the chief instruments in inflicting every calamity they fear. On the birth, therefore, of an infant, the great solicitude of the parents is to know its vintana, or destiny, which must be ascertained by certain rules. Amongst the varied exhibitions of the domination of superstition, there is not, perhaps, presented a scene of more affecting wretchedness than the one displayed in the engraving. An infant, perfectly helpless, and unconscious, smiling perhaps in innocence, is laid in a narrow entrance to a village, or a fold, through which there is barely room for cattle to pass, several of which are driven violently in, and made to pass over the spot on which the child is placed, while the parents, with agonizing feelings, stand by waiting the result. If the oxen pass over without injuring the infant, the omen is propitious; the powerful and evil destiny is removed, and the parents may, without apprehension, embrace and cherish their offspring.