University of Virginia Library

3. PART III. WHAT THE PARISH DID WITH HIM.

I.—Parochial Knots—to be untied without prejudice.

THE infant borne to the workhouse of St. Bartimeus was Ginx's Baby. When he had been placed on the floor of the matron's room, and examined by the master, that official turned to the unwelcome bearer of the burden.

"Did you find this child?''

"Yes.''

"Where?''

"Lying opposite my shop in Nether Place.''

"What's your name? ''

"Doll.''

"Oh! you're the cheesemonger. Your shop's on the other side of the boundary, in

the other parish. The child ought not to come here; it doesn't belong to us.''

"Yes it does: it wasn't on my side of the line.''

"But it was in front of your house?''

"Well, the line runs crossways: it don't follow the child was in our parish.''

"Oh, nonsense! there's no doubt about it! We can't take the child in. You must carry it away again.''

Mr. Snigger turned to leave the room.

"Wait a bit, sir,'' said Mr. Doll; "I shall leave the child here, and you can do as you like with it. It ain't mine, at all events. I say it lay in your parish; and if you don't look after it you may be the worse of it. The coroner's sure to try to earn his fees. Good-night.''

He hurried from the room.

"Stop!'' shouted the master, "I say: I don't

accept the child. You leave it here at your own risk. We keep it without prejudice, remember— without prejudice, sir!—without—''

Mr. Doll was in the street and out of hearing.

II.—A Board of Guardians.

THE Guardians of St. Bartimeus met the day after Mr. Doll's clever stratagem. Among other business was a report from the master of the workhouse that a child, name unknown, found by Mr. Doll, cheesemonger, of Nether Place, in the Parish of St. Simon Magus, opposite his shop, and, as he alleged, on the nearer side of the parish boundary, had been left at the workhouse, and was now in the custody of the matron. The Guardians were not accustomed to restrain

themselves, and did not withhold the expression of their indignation upon this announcement. As Mr. Doll had himself been a guardian of St. Simon Magus, it was clear to their impartial minds that he was trying by a trick to foist a bastard—perhaps his own—on the wrong parish.

Mr. Cheekey, a licensed victualler, moved that the master's report be put under the table.

Mr. Slinkum, draper, seconded the motion.

Mr. Edge, ironmonger, pointed out that there was no parliamentary precedent for such a disposition of the report, and, further, that such action did not dispose of the baby.

"Well,'' said Mr. Cheekey, turning painfully red, "no matter how ye put it. I move to get rid of the brat. What's the best form of motion?''

A churchwarden, who happened to be a gentleman, explained that the Board could not dismiss the question in so summary a way. "He could foresee that there might be a nice point of law in the case. They would have to take some legal means of ascertaining their liabilities, and of forcing the other parish to take the child if they ought to do so. They must consult their solicitor.'' This gentleman was sent for post haste. Meanwhile the baby was ordered to be brought in for inspection. The matron had handed him over to a sort of half-witted inmate of the house, whose wits, however, were strangely about him at the wrong time, to nurse and amuse him. This person brought Ginx's Baby into the Board-room, and placed him on the table. The Board of Guardians took a good look at him. He

was not then in fair condition. He was limp, he was dirty, hollow in the cheeks, white, stiff in his limbs, and half-naked— (to be regardless of gender)—

"Hum!'' said Mr. Stink, who was a dog-breeder—"What's his pedigree?''

This brutal joke was well received by some of the Guardians.

"His pedigree,'' answered the half-wit, gravely, "goes back for three hundred years. Parients unknown by name, but got by Misery out o' Starvashun. The line began with Poverty out o' Laziness in Queen Elizabeth's time. The breed has been a large 'un wotever you thinks of the quality.''

This pleasantry was less acceptable to the Board.

"Well,'' said Mr. Scoop, grocer, a great stickler for parliamentary modes of procedure, "I move it be committed. ''

"Committed! Where?'' said Mr. Stink.

"To Newgate I s'pose,'' said the half-wit, his eyes twinkling.

"Nonsense, sir,—for consideration. Send that man out,'' exclaimed Scoop—"clear the room for consultation.''

Davus was expelled, and the baby was then formally consigned to the care of a committee. By this time the legal adviser came in. The facts having been stated to him, he said:

"Gentlemen, as at present advised I am of opinion that the parish in which the child was found is bound to maintain him. If Mr. Doll (a highly respectable person, my own cheesemonger) found the child beyond the boundaries of St. Simon Magus—and he will

of course swear that he did—you cannot refuse to take it in. However, I had better ascertain the facts from Mr. Doll and take the opinion of counsel. Meanwhile we must beware not to compromise ourselves by admitting anything, or doing anything equivalent to an admission. Let me see—Ah!—yes —a notice to be served on the other parish repudiating the infant; another notice to Mr. Doll to take it away, and that it remains here at his risk and expense—you see, gentlemen, we could hardly venture to return it to Mr. Doll; we should create an unhappy impression in the minds of the public—''

"D—n the public!'' said Mr. Stink.

"Quite so, my dear sir,'' said Mr. Phillpotts, smiling, "quite so, but that is not a legal or in fact practicable mode of discarding them; we must act with public opinion, I fear.

Then, to resume, thirdly and to be strictly safe, we must serve a notice on the infant and all whom it may concern. I think I'll draft it at once.''

In a few minutes the committee in charge pinned to the only garment of Ginx's Baby a paper in the following form:—

PARISH OF ST. BARTIMEUS.

To — — (name unknown), a Foundling, and
all other persons interested in the said Foundling.

TAKE NOTICE

That you, or either of you, have no just or lawful
claim to have you or the said infant chargeable on the
said Parish. And this is to notify that you, the
said infant, are retained in the workhouse of the said
Parish under protest, and that whatsoever is or may
be done or provided for you is at the proper charge
of you, and all such persons as are and were by law
bound to maintain and keep the same.

WINKLE & PHILLPOTTS,

Solicitors for the Board.

III.—"The World is my Parish.''

WHEN Mr. Phillpotts called upon Doll, the cheesemonger, the latter straightway gave him the facts as they had occurred. He pointed out the exact spot on which the bundle had lain; he gave an estimate of the number of inches on each side of the line occupied by it, and declared that the head and shoulders of the infant lay in the parish of the solicitor's clients. Ginx's Baby, under the title "Re a Foundling,'' was once more submitted for the opinion of counsel. They advised the Board that as the child was in both parishes when found, but had been taken up by a ratepayer of St. Simon Magus, the latter parish was bound to support him. Whereupon the Guardians of St. Bartimeus at their next meeting resolved that the Vestry

of the other parish should have a written notice to remove the child, failing which application should be made to the Queen's Bench for a mandamus to compel them to do it.

On receiving the challenge the Guardians of St. Simon Magus also took counsel's opinion. They were advised that as the greater part, and especially the head of the infant, was when discovered in the parish of St. Bartimeus, the latter was clearly chargeable. Both parties then proceeded to swear affidavits. The Attorney-General and Solicitor-General, the two great law-officers of the crown, were retained on opposite sides, and took fees—not for an Imperial prosecution, but as petty Queen's Counsel in an inter-parochial squabble.

IV.—Without prejudice to any one but the Guardians.

THE Court of Queen's Bench, after hearing an elaborate statement from the Attorney-General, granted a rule nisi for a mandamus. This rule was entered for argument in a paper called "The Special Paper,'' and, the list being a heavy one, nearly a year elapsed before it was reached. It was then again postponed several times "for the convenience of counsel.''

The Board of St. Bartimeus chafed under the law's delay. They became morbidly sensitive to the incubus of Ginx's Baby, especially as the press had been reviewing some of their recent acts with great bitterness. The Guardians were defiant. Having served their notices, they were induced by Mr. Stink to resolve not to maintain the infant. The

poor child was threatened with dissolution. Thus, no doubt, many difficulties in parochial administration are solved—the subject vanishes away. The baby was kept provisionally in a room at the workhouse. On the outside of the door was a notice in fair round-hand:—

NOTICE.

DOLL'S FOUNDLING.

Pending the legal inquiry into the facts concerning the above infant, and a decision as to its settlement, all officials, assistants, and servants of the workhouse are forbidden to enter the room in which it is deposited, or to render it any service or assistance, on pain of dismissal. No food is to be supplied to it from the workhouse kitchen.

N.B. This is not intended to prevent persons other than officials, &c., from having access to the infant, or assisting it.

BY ORDER OF THE BOARD.

That any body of human beings, other than Patagonians, could have coolly contemplated such a result as must have followed upon the strict performance of this order, would be incredible except in the instance of the Guardians of St. Bartimeus. There was nothing they could not do—or leave undone. Fortunately for Ginx's Baby, the order was disobeyed. Occasionally lady visitors went to look at him and give him some food—he was toddling about the room on unsteady legs—but charity seemed to be appalled by the official questions hanging about this child. The master, Snigger, whose business it was every day to ascertain whether the cause of the great parochial quarrel was in, or out of, existence, became a traitor to the Board. When the child grew hungry and dangerously thin, he brought bottles of pap

prepared by Mrs. Snigger, and administered it to him. No conclusions to the disfavor of the Board were to be drawn from this conduct, for Snigger was particular to say to the boy in a loud voice, each time he fed him:—

"Now, youngster, this is without prejudice, remember! I give you due notice—without prejudice.''

Who, in Master Ginx's situation, would have had any prejudices to such action, or have expressed them even if they were entertained? He took no objection as he took the pap; while Snigger was glad to be able to do an unusual kindness without compromising the parish.

Thus things had gone on for many months, when one day an eye of that Argus monster, the Public, was set upon Ginx's Baby. A well-known

nobleman, calling at the workhouse to see a little girl whom he had saved from infamy, as he passed down a corridor was arrested by the notice on the door of our hero's room. Curiosity took him in, and horror chained him there for some time. Had he not entered, Ginx's Baby, spite of Snigger, would in twenty-four hours have ceased to supply facts to history. He was suffering from low fever, and his condition was as sensationally shocking as any reporter could have wished. Out rushed the peer for a doctor, took a cab to a magistrate and detailed the whole case, to be repeated in next morning's papers. Penny-a-liners ran to the spot, wrote vivid descriptions of the baby and the room, and transcribed the notice. The Guardians were drubbed in trenchant leaders and indignant letters. They, instead of bending to the storm, strove to confront it, and passed angry resolutions of a childish and grotesque character. The few of them who possessed any sense of propriety were railed at in the meetings till they ceased to attend. The uproar outside increased. Why did not the President of the Poor-Law Board interfere? At last he did interfere: that is, instead of visiting the scene himself, and satisfying his own eyes as to the truth of what his ears had heard, a process that would have taken a couple of hours, he appointed a gentleman to hold an inquiry. The Guardians became furious. The reports of their proceedings read like the vagaries of a lunatic asylum or the deliberations of the American Senate. They discharged Snigger for breach of orders, substituting a relative of Mr. Stink. They put a lock on the door, and passed food to the Baby by a stick. A committee was appointed to see him fed, and they forwarded a memorial to the Poor-Law Board, stating that "he daily had more food than he could possibly eat, and was in admirable condition.'' They refused to allow any doctor but one employed by themselves to see him. They procured from him a certificate that the noble busybody and his physician had made a mistake, and that all the functions of life in the infant appeared to be in perfect order. Then came the gentleman, and the inquiry, and his report, and a letter from the Poor-Law Board, and further discussions and more letters, until the bewildered public gnashed its teeth at the Minister, the Guardians, and the law, and wished them all at Land's End or beyond it.

V.-An Ungodly Jungle.

THE case of the Guardians of St. Bartimeus against the Guardians of St. Simon Magus was at length reached. The argument lasted for two days. There is a grim work, the short title whereof is "Burns's Justice,'' in five fat volumes, from which the legal Dryasdust turns aghast. In one of these portentous books, title "Poor,'' pp. 1200, the inquisitive may find a code unrivalled by the most malignant ingenuity of former or contemporary nations: a code wherein, by gradual accretion, has been framed a system of relief to poverty and distress so impolitic, so unprincipled, that none but the driest, mustiest, most petrified parish official could be expected to lift up his voice to defend it; so complicated that no man under heaven

knows its length or breadth or height or depth; yet it stands to this hour a monument of English stolidity—a marvel of lazy or ignorant statesmanship. Imagine, if you please, a Lord Chief Justice and three Puisnes, all keen, practical men, alive to public policy and the common weal, eager to extricate the truth and do the right, plunging into this "ungodly jungle,'' thwarted at every turn, in search of justice for Ginx's Baby. With all his patient industry and lightning quickness of apprehension, the Chief Justice found it hard to reconcile past and present, or evolve from the vast confusion anything consistent with his moral instincts.

—Clear the board, gentlemen. True regenerative legislation will begin by drawing away the rubbish. Reform means more than repair.

Mend, patch, take down a little here, prop up some tottering nuisance there, fill in gaping chinks with patent legislative cement, coat old façades with bright paint, hide decay beneath a gloze of novelty, titivate, decorate, furbish—and after all your house is not a new one, but a whited sepulchre shaking to decay. Repair? There is a Repair party, intermediating between Tories and Reformers—Radicals or Rooters let us call these latter if you like—who cling to "vested interests'' and all other sorts of antique nuisances, yet say they are willing to improve them. REFORM, which means, Pull down with bold statesman's hand, and with like hand REBUILD, is no darling of your political Repairer. Call the party and the men by their right names: and give me for utility in legislation or administrative action an Old Tory and Obstructive party rather than this middling, meddling, muddling Repairer—

Just now all Social Reformation, in its noblest aims and attempts, is fettered by the Repair party. What is termed Sanitary Reform is enfeebled, and the vigor withdrawn from it, by this party. "Vested rights,'' "the Liberty of the people,'' "Interference with personal freedom,'' "EXPENSE,'' —these are the watchwords of the Repairer in opposition to him who, pointing to the pallor and fever of a hundred neighborhoods, calls upon a ministry to cleanse them with imperial force.

A comprehensive scheme of National Education is seized and half-throttled by the Repair

party. "Oh! utilize what there is; improve on and tack to the denominational system; avail yourself of the jealousy of sects; see what a grand building that has already erected! True, it is not large enough; true, it is badly built; but repair that, and add wings. It will cost you ever so much to rebuild—Repair!''

The methods of relief to the Poor are old, cumbrous, unequal, as stupid as those who administer them. Forth steps the Reformer, and cries out—"Clear this wrack away! Get rid of your antiquated Bumbledom, your parochial and non-parochial distinctions, your complicated map of local authorities; re-distribute the kingdom on some more practical system, redress the injustice of unequal rating, improve the machinery and spirit of relief, and so on.'' You have the

Repair party shouting its Non possumus as loudly as any other arch-obstructive: "Heaven forbid! Queen Elizabeth and the Poor Laws for ever! To the rescue of Local Government and Vested Interests! Repair!''

Some one with a long head and a divinely-warmed heart, searching vainly for help to thousands in the packed alleys of his English Home, sends his quick glance across seas to rich lands that daily cry to heaven for strong arms that wield the plough and spade. "Ho!'' he shouts, "Labor to Land—starvation to production—death unto life!'' and he calls upon every statesman and patriot to help the good work, and give their energies to frame an Emigration Scheme. Then the Repair party foams: "Send away the Labor, the source of our wealth? No. Mend the

condition of the laborer; give him the sop of political rights—free breakfasts—the ballot. Give State funds to alter social conditions? No. Improve the methods of local assistance to Emigration; it is a temporary remedy— Repair!''

Thus, according to the gospel of this party, everything must be subject of restoration only. Like antiquarians, they utter groans over the abolition of anything, however ugly it may be, however unfitted for human uses, and with however so elegant a piece of artistry you desire to displace it. For them a Gilbert-Scott politician, reverential restorer of bygone styles, enthusiastic to conserve and amend the grotesque Gothic policies of the past, rather than some Brunel or Stephenson statesman, engineering in novel mastery of circumstances—not fearful to face and conquer even the antique

impediments of Nature. Give me a trenchant statesman, or I pray you leave legislation alone. Better things as they are than patched to distraction.

At length, by means of some delicate legal adjustments, the judges saw their way to affirming that Ginx's Baby's parish was that of St. Bartimeus, and refused the rule for a mandamus.

VI.—Parochial Benevolence—and another translation.

THE authorities of St. Bartimeus did not take kindly to the charge imposed upon them by the Queen's Bench. Some of the Guardians privately hinted to the master that it was unnecessary to overfeed the infant. They did not burthen him with much clothing, and what he had was shared with many lively

companions. When you, good matron, look at your little pink-cheeked daughter, so clean and so cosy in her pretty cot, waking to see the well-faced nurse, or you, still sweeter to her eyes, watching above her dreams, perhaps you ought to stop a moment to contrast the scene with the sad tableaux you may get sight of not far away. * * * Ginx's Baby was not an ill-favored child. He had inherited his father's frame and strength: these helped him through the changes we are relating. What if these capacities had, by simple nourishing food, cleanly care-taking, and brighter, kindlier associations, been trained into full working order? Left alone or ill-tended they were daily dwindling, and the depreciation was going on not solely at the expense of little Ginx, but of the whole community. To reduce his strength one-half was to reduce one-half his chances of independence, and to multiply the prospects of his continuous application for STATE AID.

The money spent in stopping a hole in a Dutch dyke is doubtless better invested than if it were to be retained until a vast breach had laid half a kingdom under water. Surely your Hollander would agree to be mulcted in one-third of his fortune rather than run the hazard!

Every day through this wealthy country there are men and women busy marring the little images of God, that are by-and-by to be part of its public-shadowing young spirits, repressing their energy, sapping their vigor or failing to make it up, corrupting their nature by foul associations, moral and physical. Some are doing it by special

license of the devil, others by Act of Parliament, others by negligence or niggardliness. Could you teach or force these people—many unconsciously engaged in the vile work—to run together, as men alarmed by sudden danger, and throw around a helpless generation influences and a care more akin to your own home ideal, would you not transfigure the next epoch—would not your labor and sacrifice be a GOD-WORK, reaching out weighty, fruit-laden branches far into the grateful future? 'Tis by feeling and enjoining everywhere the need of such a movement as this that you, O all-powerful woman! can carry your will into the play of a great economic and social reform. Society that recognizes not a root-truth like that is sowing the wind—God knows what it will reap.

So the Guardians, keeping carefully within

the law, neglected nothing that could sap little Ginx's vitality, deaden his happiest instincts, derange moral action, cause hope to die within his infant breast almost as soon as it were born. Good God!

The items the Board were really entitled to charge the rate-payers as supplied to our hero were—

• Dirt,
• Fleas,
• Foul air,
• Chances of catching skin diseases, fevers, &c.,
• Vile company,
• Neglect,
• Occasional cruelty, and
• A small supply of bad food and clothing.

Every pauper was to them an obnoxious

charge by any and every means to be reduced to a minimum or nil. Ginx's Baby was reduced to a minimum. His constitution enabled him to protest against reduction to nil. But, just after the bills of costs had been taxed, mulcting the rate-payers of St. Bartimeus in a sum of more than £1,600, the Guardians were made aware of the name and origin of their charge. One of the persons who had deserted him was arrested for theft, and among other articles in her possession were some of the Baby's clothes. She confessed the whole story, and declared that the child left in Nether Place was no other than the Protestant Baby, son of Ginx, about whom so much stir had been made two years before. The Guardians were not long in tracing Ginx, and, at his quarters in Rosemary Street, the hapless changeling was one day delivered by a deputy relieving-officer, with the benediction, by me sadly recorded—

"There he is, d—n him!''

I am sure if the Guardians had been there they would have said:

"Amen.''