discovered wherewith to pay labour, and so many colonies were open to emigration, that no excuse remained for dreading that surplus population which had become a mere bugbear. The former surplus population was a real and grave evil: but to develop industry and education, and throw open the harvest-fields of the world, was the remedy. In the same way now there are half-fed families and depressed neighbourhoods; but there is a remedy in such an improved intelligence as shall distribute labour where it is wanted, and in good sense and good conduct which shall make the most of resources at home. In other words, there is enough for everybody, if everybody knew how to use it.
Under such an improved state of affairs how have the children been getting on? I am not considering the children who can work, but infants—infants so young that they used to be dear precisely because they were so helpless—precious, because they were of value to the heart alone—but infants of whom it had been discovered that they were unprofitable to such a degree that some arrangement must be made to compensate for the peculiarity. Under the unreformed poor-law, at its worst period, daughters had presented themselves at the board to ask for pay for nursing their parents: and such daughters were just the sort of mothers to sit down, with their baby on their lap, to calculate the gain of insuring it in a burial-club. One of them told us, a few years ago, how she managed. She put arsenic on her breasts when she suckled her babies, as soon as they grew expensive and troublesome. She had sent eight out of the world in this way; and she could not see that she had not done right. She said it was better for the children, who would be more certainly “provided for” than they could be by their father: and of course it was better for the father and herself. So she murdered her eight children before she was herself brought to the gallows.
There is a town in England which had, five years ago, a population somewhat under 100,000. It is a healthy and prosperous place, where the average age reached by the easy classes is as high as forty-seven years, and where the work-people are so far thriving as that they pay largely to the various objects of Friendly Societies. What would my readers suppose to be the mortality among children in such a place? Of a hundred children born, how many die in infancy?—Of the children of the gentry, 18 per cent. die in infancy. Of those of the working classes how many? 56 per cent. “What an enormous mortality!” everyone will exclaim. “What can be the reason! How does this mortality compare with that of other places?”
To ascertain this, we will take some district which shall be undeniably inferior to this town in probability of life. The rural parts of Dorsetshire—where the poverty of the labourers is actually proverbial—may be selected as the lowest we can propose. Yet the infants of Dorsetshire labourers have four times as good a chance of life as the children we have been speaking of. In that healthy and prosperous town the infant mortality was, five year since, fourfold that of the poorest parts of Dorsetshire. The same thing was then true of Manchester. When wages were highest, and everybody was able to live comfortably, four times as many per cent. of the children who were born died in Manchester as in Dorsetshire.
Was there any peculiarity in the case of these short-lived families? any circumstance in their management which could account for the difference? What the impression was at the time we see by a presentment by the Liverpool grand jury, which mainly occasioned the next change in the law of Friendly Societies. What the grand jury said was this: “They could not separate without recording their unanimous opinion that the interference of the legislature is imperatively called for, to put a stop to the present system of money payments by burial-societies. From the cases brought before them at the present assizes, as well as from past experience, the grand jury have no doubt that the present system acts as a direct incentive to murder; and that many of their fellow beings are, year after year, hurried into eternity by those most closely united to them by the ties of nature and blood—if not of affection—for the sake of a few pounds, to which, by the rules of the societies, as at present constituted, the survivors are entitled. The continuance of such a state of things it is fearful to contemplate.”
The grand jury had an incitement, of course, to say what they did. The occasion was the trial which my readers may remember, for the murder of two boys, aged eight and four, for the sake of the payment from a burial-club; and the immediate sanction for their request was the alarm expressed by Lord Shaftesbury, supported by Baron Alderson’s avowed belief that burial-clubs occasioned infant mortality on a large scale. How much concern had the healthy and prosperous town I have described with burial-clubs?
The population, we have seen, was under 100,000. On the “death-lists,” as the register of insurance was popularly called, there were the names of nearly 39,000 infants. It is clear that there must be some great mistake or fraud where it was pretended that 39-100ths of the inhabitants were infants insured in burial-clubs. We find some explanation in the plan pursued by a Manchester man of uncommon thrift. He entered his children in nineteen burial-clubs. By a comparison of numbers and registers, it was found to be a common practice for parents to subscribe to as many clubs for each child as they could afford. And not parents only. It was discovered that women who undertook the charge of work people’s infants, were in the habit of insuring the children in burial-clubs; thus acquiring a direct interest in the death of their charge.
When these facts became known, through the inquiry caused by the Liverpool grand jury, and by a published letter by the well-known chaplain of the Preston House of Correction, the world naturally cried out that there must be a bad spirit of suspicion, of exaggeration, and of evil imagination in those who could say such things of English people. A Committee of the House of Commons inquired into the subject in 1854: and meantime the following facts were ascertained.
It was found, in the first place, that though the