The Central Glamorgan Gazette, and General, Commercial, and Agricultural Advertiser. — 1867-10-11 (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan, Wales)

NURSERIES OF CRIME.  - ------ Mrs. Jagger, of Wood-lanegrove, Tottenham, bids fair to reach a higher pinnacle of fame than her finger-gnawing namesake in "Great Expectations." She has furnished a text for many sermons in this last week's journals, which ought to be productive of some good effect. But one of the delightful peculiarities of this Christian people, whose aapremacy in virtue and on the Bea is undisputed, is that they do all their moral badig. nation by deputy. Some time-honoured abuse, common because it is easily concealed, is dragged to light; the moral Englishman or Englishwoman sits down and reads two or three stirring leading articles on the question, and connives his or her duty done; the next day they practice or eneourage the same abuse. We have little hope, though the inquest on Mrs. Jagger's nurse-child happily occureed in the dull season, that these bursts of virtuous indignation which followed this "revelation of a social mystery" will prove worth more than the paper on which they were written. We are not going to pour our scathing wrath on the head of Mrs. Jagger. She, and such as she, are but the creations of other. It is the parents of these children who seem to us to deserve the blame. "The young lady of wealth and position," who gave her illegitimate child into the charge of a woman who only required six shillings a week to clothe and feed it, may have saved her honour, but she has not repaired her damaged virtue. It may be a very wicked thing to have an illegitimate child, but having given birth to it, we do not see how the mother's duties can be less towards that child than if it were born in wedlock ; we should say they ought to be greater. The concealment of the mother's and father's names would hardly have been possible had they not been persons of wealth and position; that it was justified by that circumstance we cannot admit. The young lady threatened to commit aucicide were hei disgrace known; but if she could overcome her maternal instinct so far as to send her child more than a hundred miles away from her to a woman, who, she must have known, could not have attended to it properly, or given it sufficient food, she surely might have overcome her sense of shame sufficiently to have stopped short of this desperate resort. It is the mothers who send their children to these Mrs. Jaggers, on whose heads the guilt of the children's deaths lies, and it is mere hypocrisy to propose to punish the woman who takes a nurse-child for a weekly stipend, on which it is impossible she can afford to feed it properly, and to leave unnoticed the mother, who, possessing the means to provide for her child, but lacking the courage at once to murder it, submits it wilfully to a process of slow starvation.  But a far' wider question is involved in this matter. The system of morality which exists in this country, which practically teaches that concealment of vice is better than virtue, pretending to derive itself from a religion, which, if rightly understood, or practised, should inculcate the noblest and pnie3t system of morals ever known, is a species of organised hypocrisy which cannot exist much longer. Either we must abandon ourselves to the open, and so far preferable, profligacy of the 17th century, or we must remould our religion, on the basis of natural morality. The state of society, which takes no note of unchastity as long as the consequences of it are concealed, is rotten at the core. Better by far an avowed infidelity, than that spurious religion which enforces no virtue but that which consists in appearance. We may plume ourselves on the purity of our Court—on the elevated, moral tone (God Save the mark !) of our family life ; but the time must come when we shall be no longer able to impose upon ourselves, as we have long ceased to be able to impose upon others. That it may come soon must be the earnest wish of those who, allowing themselves to drift with the stream, yet despise themselves for their weakness, and yearn for something like sincerity, whether in Vice or Virtue.—Tomahawk..  eItILDREN