The Express.
London, England, 1868-09-15 00:00:00

THE TREATMENT OF CHILDMIN.

Ir wee one of the few scarcely sane suggestions
of one of the sanest of men, RUM, that for
specially revolting crimes there should be specially
terrible punishments. When it comes to killing
you are stopped short. You execute the man who
stabs his enemy : you can do no more to the man
who poisons his mother or his wife. Perhaps, he
proceeds to say, we might throw the very bad
malefactors to wild beasts, or something of that
kind ; it would be terrible to the criminal, and
terrible to the popular imagination. It certainly
would. but, unfortunately, the " lions in the
" Tower" are no longer a royal property, and we
do not believe the Zoological Society would con-
tract.

There is, however, another objection. In spite
of a strong current of reaction towards severity in
punishment, the general set of the stream is the
other way. Yet few of us can hear of cruelty to
children (among many particularly revolting
offences) without a vague wish that some spe-
cially severe punishment could be brought to
bear upon the criminals. If we analyse this
feeling, we find that. at all events in disciplined
minds, it amounts to a desire to impart into
the punishment a more than usual share of
expressed indignation. We cannot fail to note
how fierce is the angry disgust which the crime
inspires ; for it is constantly the case that the cri-
minals are hi danger from the violence of the
crowd. This is something, but it is not much.
There is, of course, the Association for Enforcing
the Laws relating to Women and Children, and of
all associations of the kind it is perhaps the least
questionable. But does not the very fact that
,tub an institution should be necessary, or pre-
sumed necessary, point to a defect, or to more than
one defect, in the laws relating to women and
children Mr. Mrii., in his essay "On Liberty,"
instances the unchecked license we allow to
parents in their treatment of the young as one of
the proofs that our notions of liberty are yet in a
very crude state. We know the extreme difficulty
of the subject. A recent extension of the Facto-
ries Act, applying to children, is well known to
have proved a failure. You shall not send your
children to work, says the law, unless you also
'mend them to school. 'Very good, say the
manufacturers, we do not care to be plagued
with looking after the subject; it will ac-
tually pay us better to have older children.
And very good again, say the parents,
we shall not send our children out to work, we
shall keep theta at home and set them to work in
private ; and they do it. And all the " inspection "
does not meet the difficulty ; because evasion and
concealment are so easy. Mr. Mu., though he
has expressed strong opinions, has not made,
we believe, a single specific suggestion for greater
stringency, or greater workableness, or even greater
specialisation of the laws relating to children.
But the subject is worthy of him, and, perhaps, in
connection with that of national education, he may
before long have something to say about it. The
Rev. A. SOLLY, at the Society of Arts, not long
ago, proposed to revive the law of frank-pledge.
That would meet this difficulty, and save others ;
but—not to speak profanely—we wish Mr. Roux
may get it ; and we are sure the remedy would be
worse than the disease. For the present, one sees
no way of preventing the occasional ill-treatment
and starvation of children by parenta who are bad
enough, and scarcely any adequate available pun-
isLmeut for the offence.