The Sun.
London, England, 1870-05-05 00:00:00

LONDON, 7HUI?SDAY, 31.1.17 5, 1870.

THE very word " baby-farming" excites such ter-
rible associations that our readers will be surprised
to learn there is a portion of the kingdom where the
practice is not only passively recognised, but actively
adopted by the executive, and is found to answer in
every way. The system known as boarding out has,
however, only a superficial analogy to baby-farming.
In the latter case the child is put out too often only
in order to be "put away." It is a child of sin and
shame, and the mother would save her reputa-
tion at the cost of a life. The baby-farmer
understands what is wanted ; understands that
the " little stranger" is anything but " welcome,"
and that if it should languish and die no tears will
be shed, no questions will be asked. It is otherwise
with the Scotch pauper infant. This child is
" boarded out " in order that it may have a better
chance of moral and physical health than it would
have, if reared in the workhouse. In truth,
the workhouse is by no means a good nursery. It

contains, as a rule, all the least reputable of the
labouring class without the purifying influence
of honest industry, Poverty is not necessarily
vicious, but, as has been remarked in the current
number of the Westminster Review, the workhouse
concentrates into one society that which, when distri-
buted over some thirty parishes, was rendered com-
paratively harmless by the large admixture of a
better principle. It is the seething together in a
cess-pool of the foul streams which, when plentifully
diluted with water, are deprived of their
fatal power. Some attempt has been made
to correct this by the establishment of pauper
schools, not in the workhouses, but in distinct
buildings intended for wider areas than a single
union, and therefore called district schools. Neither
the union nor the district school seems, however, to
have answered. There was a fair outside appear-
ance, but within all was rottenness. Mr. Tufnell, the
Government inspector, reported most favourably of
the Eton Union School; yet within a very short
time afterwards the school was broken up with his
approval. More than 40 per cent. of the girls
placed out as servants and apprentices had turned
out ill. The children were removed to
the Central London District School, at Han-
well. but here they did no better than before.
It was sound that both schools were chargeable with
the same defect. " Children are brought up under con-
ditions the very reverse of those which by the con-
stitution of human society, and the experience of all
time, are pointed out as naturally best adapted for
the development of the child's powers, physical,
intellectual, and moral." In a word, family life
did not exist in these schools. This dif-
ficulty had struck a well known German
philanthropist some time before. Pastor Bram
of Neukirchen foufid his solution of it in
persuading Christian parents who were either
childless or had few children to adopt one or more
pauper children as their own, and in five years he
disposed of 288 in this way. But at the same time
he admitted that his principle was novel, and that
persons were slow in carrying it out. IN o matter tiaougn
they might be sighing and longing for little ones,
they were loath to satisfy the yearnings of
their heart by taking children who were
not their own. We believe that in the United States
the system has been more readily received, for labour
being dear, Western State farmers have been glad to
receive children, and rear them, in order that they
may get the benefit of the children's services as soon
as these are worth anything.

It is, however, to Scotland that we must turn for

the solution of our present difficulty. Labour is not
so valuable in this country that farmers •or other em-

ployers will care to be burdened with the maintenance
a a strange child merely for the sake of prospective
advantage. Nor are the English middle and upper
classes, with their very decided, not to say
exclusive, ideas about family life, at all likely to
introduce pauper children into their households and
treat them as their own children. Even if there
were a greater willingness to do this, the wisdom of
it would be somewhat doubtful. It would not be
prudent, for instance, to give paupers any additional
incentive to improvidence. If it were a common
thing for pauper children to be made gentlemen
and ladies of, the labouring classes would be even more
reckless about marriage and paternity than they are
at present. The Scotch system arranges that a
child shall be brought up in the same sphere of life
as his parents. Assuming that the child has either
become an orphan, been deserted, or, by the entry of
its parents into the workhouse, been sepa-
rated from them, it is, while quite
young (if an infant, so much the better)
handed over to a " nurse," the wife of a cottager
for the most part, and brought up by her with her
own family. She receives.a payment from the Poor-
law guardians until the child is old enough to earn

its own living, that is until it is 10 years of age, and
during the whole of these years the ehild is under