The Sun. — 1844-08-27 (London, England)

MORTALITY. PREMIUMS ON TIIE DEATH OF CHILDREN. In the evidence of one of the physicians examined before the Commissioners of Inquiry into the state of large towns, &c., whose first report has just appeared, we observe these words :—" I used often to observe great apathy in a certain class about the death of their children. They did not seem to look on the death of the young as the great evil which it is commonly regarded ; they said, ' God took care of young children who died; that their death did not ;natter much ; that life was full of hardships and misers-, and that the child was provided for when it died.' • This feeling I found to be rather c0mm0n."—(3,313, p. 203). The picture here presented is true to nature so far as it goes ; but the shades in which it must be finished, we regret to say, are of a much deeper grain than those yet laid on. There is not merely indifference among the labouring population of England in regard to the death of their children ; in some places there is a positive premium upon the event, and that to such an amount that instead of Dog-stealers' Bills, and Chimney-sweepers' Bills, and Blacklegs' Bills, we shall, next session of Parliament, have to get some intelligent legislator to introduce a Bill to prevent English men and English women from being accessory, in cold blood, to the destruction of their own offspring! The new sacrifice to Moloch is perpetrated in this way : soon after a child is born, it is entered on the books of as many burying-clubs as the parents can command funds to pay for. The sums subscribed to each is hut a few pence, or even half-pence, weekly ; so that parties being in full employment can sometimes afford to have the name on the register of ten or a dozen of these societies. And the investment may always be made a profitable one : the hapless child has but to be killed by exposure, by neglect and worse treatment, to give these unnatural parents a claim upon the several societies of which they have enrolled their infant a member, to the extent in all, perhaps, of 301., 401., and even 50/. ! We feel the hot blood rising to our cheek, as the outward sense follows the pen that is fixing indelibly such statements as these, which will soon he before the public in all their revolting details, authenticated by the Commission whose first report is referred to above.  What comment shall we make, what comment can be made, upon a state of society so horrible—a state of society in which one of the first and most powerful impulses of the human heart is set at nought ? Tigers and wolves give suck, and laying their savage natures by, tenderly wait upon and cherish their young. Man and woman, made more than wolf or tiger by force of circumstances, beget children in the prospect of deriving pecuniary advantage from their death!  The difficulty of living, the recklessness that is engendered by the pressure of vice and misery, and the daily and familiar contact with them, lead men first to despise the laws of God, which are also those of nature, and then to defy the laws of man—to set fire to the rick that contain the harvests which their own hands have toiled for and gathered, and so to destroy in an hour the bounty of a year—to smother natural affection in their hearts, and doom their own flesh and blood to premature death, that they may have a fuller meal and a draught of beer the more ! Great God ! is it not horrible ? What may be done to abate the fast accumulating load of guilt and infamy under which we must needs be whelmed if we sit supine ? We put it to our brethren to meditate this subject, and to use the light and information they so commonly posses for the illumination of those among our men of rank and influence with whom, in the course of the holidays, so many of them are brought into contact. Let them remind these our leaders that the time is not long gone by, when defective legislation raised the price of a perishable human carcase to such a height, that it became a temptation to commit murder ; and that at one time subjects were selected for the dissecting-room in the streets, just as sheep and oxen are selected for the shambles in the fields.