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Cries from the Cradle.

There was once a wealthy king of Phrygia, called Midas, who is said to have owed his wealth to the finding of a large treasure. He showed so much kindness to an old man named Silenus, who was tutor to the god Bacchus, that the god rewarded him by permitting him to choose whatever recompence he pleased. His riches instead of satisfying him, had only made him more avaricious, and so he asked Bacchus to fulfil his promise by decreeing that everything he touched might turn to gold. The request was granted. But Midas soon found out his mistake; for when he tried to eat, the food turned to gold in his mouth, and when he went to bed, the couch changed into a slab of gold; when he put on his clothes they turned into a suit of gold; no one dared to shake hands with him for fear their fingers should be transmuted into gold; and his wife and children ran away from him lest, in addition to the family plate, they themselves should be made to represent a family of gold. There was a glut of gold upon poor Midas's market, and a depletion of everything else. So he went back to Bacchus and entreated him to revoke the page 4 decree, whereupon he was sent to wash himself in the river Pactolus, whose sands turned into gold as soon as Midas touched them. That is more than you can do when you take a "header" into the Lambeth Bath. But the evil star still followed Midas, and he was betrayed into the temerity of stating that Pan could sing and play the flute better than Apollo; whereupon Apollo, as a sort of satire on his want of ear for music, changed his ears into those of an ass. Midas did all he could to hide this deformity from his subjects. He wore a wig with hair to cover his long ears, and resorted to many ingenious disguises to keep the secret. But one day a servant saw his master's ears, and being unable to keep the secret, he went and dug a hole in the ground, and whispered the truth into the hole, "Midas has ass's ears." Over that place there grew a cluster of marsh reeds, and as the wind blew over the reeds, they whispered the same sentence; and one day the queen, the wife of Midas, strolling past die spot, heard these reeds whispering, "Midas has ass's ears! Midas has ass's ears!" So she went home, and finding her husband on the judgment seat amongst his nobles and his subjects, she snatched off his wig and crown, and left him with his donkey's ears exposed, the contempt and laughter of the company.

Such is the legend of Midas. But there is another tale of reeds and rushes on the page of history, not less romantic, and more true. About four thousand years ago, a stately lady walked with her attendant along the banks of the river Nile, in Egypt. Tall bulrushes grew out of the water, nodding their plumes as the south wind swept amongst them. The lady seemed to listen with a mixture of tenderness and fear for the sound which came from the bulrushes. If any one came by, she looked at them with dread, lest the bulrushes should disclose a secret. page 5 And when they had passed from sight and sound, she seemed to breathe more freely. And certainly, as that south wind stirs the rushes, there is a strange sound rising from amongst them. It is like the cry of a child. And when it rises loudly, the watcher hastens down amongst the tall rushes, and quiets the cry, lest it should reach the ears of Pharaoh's spies; for the tyrant's sleuth-hounds are out upon the scent that they may slay the first-born. But Pharaoh's daughter has the infant Moses safe, with the rippling Nile rocking his cradle of river-flags. And that cry from the cradle rocked by the water, is the key-note of the word of command at which that self-same Nile shall teem with plagues for Pharaoh and his land, at which the Red Sea shall wall the march of Israel with its waves, and whelm the tyrant's myriads with its collapsing tide.

So that, apart from its immediate power and music, a cry from a cradle may have potent meaning. Moreover, it is a cry which never wavers. The costermonger's cry varies according to the demand for his wares; but the baby-market is for ever firm. Stocks fluctuate, but babies never. The little bald-headed strangers continue to arrive, and there is great cry, though very little wool. "The cry is still, they come!" And there is little variation in the cry after they have come, for that matter; the key-note is pretty much the same through the whole world's orchestra; and it is more than possible we may have a specimen here before we get away, to show that the infant lungs are in good order. Mr. Sims Reeves once tried very hard to get the pitch lowered, and to induce Sir Michael Costa to let singers sing small. But I question whether he met with much success. I know that it is not the case in my nursery; and I believe the testimony of Mr. Benedeck, whatever may be that of Mr. Benedict, is that it remains much the same page 6 in the cradle if not in the concert-room. Hanover Square may have changed its note, but you can't get change for a note for love or money in the nursery; it is still the high and unbroken "tenner" and the rate of discount is unattainable by human resource.

There certainly is some excuse for the pertinacity of those cries which we associate with the cradle; for modern ingenuity has devised tortures for the young, to which most of us were strangers. Who has not seen two thin-necked, heavy-headed children, dangling out of one of those execrable contrivances called perambulators, as if they were veal being whitened, after the humane practice of butchers in respect of calves, for the meat-market? What wonder that when they are taken out and shaken from the muddled sleep into which they have been perambulated, they should be fretful and petulant? There used to be an advertisement constantly appearing in the papers, in which the question was propounded "Do you double-up your perambulators?" I am certain that if the infants who are condemned to' sit in them while the nursemaid flirts with her soldier swain, or coquets with the policeman, could but speak, they Would say, "No, but the perambulator doubles me up." Another advertisement used to ask "Do you bruise your oats yet?" I couldn't help thinking, when I saw two heavy babies in a perambulator, wheeled over an old gentleman's toe on the Clapham road, the other day, that he must have felt that a patent had been invented for bruising his corns to say nothing about oats. The best carriage and pair for a baby, is a pair of strong, kind arms, to lift the little creature over the first hills and dales of life's highway. Even that, however, requires discretion and humanity. Some industrious nursemaids who are clever with their needles, page 7 have a cruel knack of rubbing the first finger of the right hand, which has been made as rough as a spice-box by the needle, against the unprotected skin of the infants which they carry, and the consequence of the untimely friction is often a cry from the cradle, which indefinitely postpones the hour of peace.

When we remember what a number of wives Solomon had to plague him, we can excuse his being rather ill-tempered. But fond mammas will hardly excuse him for declaring that "childhood and youth are vanity." Still, as he also pronounces almost everything else under the sun to be vanity, we must not attach too much importance to what he says. When the first sense of importance has subsided in consequence of a man having been born into the world, the ingenuity of the female mind is concentrated on the discovery of the signs which the infant gives of "taking notice." When a baby three weeks old rolls its eye round in a spasm, the matronly chorus cries, "How it takes notice." When, in the petulance of teething, it puts its foot into a teacup, or pokes its finger into the eye of a bye-stander, the mother does not attempt to restrain the eccentricity, since it is a precocious sign of taking notice : and she challenges the victim whose eye has been poked half out, to take notice of the fact, which he finds it difficult to do, but does his best, at a discreet distance, through his tears. Each squeak and grunt which proceed from amongst the wraps and bundles is coherent to the maternal ear, and, though literally attributable rather to wind than wisdom, and savouring more of flatulence than philosophy, it is parentally pronounced to be a wondrous instance of taking notice. The Druids used to predict destiny from the direction in which their victims fell, so does a mother prognosticate futurity, by the way her baby tumbles off the table, and puts it down to the score of taking page 8 notice. The priests of Moloch used to fling up pigeons into the air, and calculate their auguries by their flights and alightings; so too, again, does the flight of a baby supersede the flight of a bird, and enable the mother to prophecy great things from its flight from the cradle to the floor, as illustrative of taking notice. And when the little wiseacre tries to put its nightcap on its foot, and its socks upon its head, mamma claps her hands in the ecstasy of one who presides over the infancy of a Solon, and cries, "Bless it, how it takes notice!"

But, though we may laugh at the ingenuity of interpretation with which mothers turn convulsions into signs of intelligence, these mothers are right in the main, if not in the detail. Children do take notice, and take very close notice too, of the examples which are set before them. A gentle touch, nursing the child tenderly, will wake a soft vibration through the gamut of the whole life; while a rough and heedless tending will throw the whole being out of time, and make a discord in the after character. Some parents bring up their children, watching them patiently, teaching them anxiously, loving them tenderly. Others drag them up, and being pitchforked into life, it is no marvel if they show some of the fork-prongs in their dispositions when they grow up. The oath which is so terribly articulate in the violent man, is often nothing but a disregarded cry from the cradle of the neglected child. If that cradle-cry had been assuaged by a soothing touch, a tender tone, or a composing kiss, it would not have rankled into early petulance, and ripened into later wrath. The evil signs of reckless maturity, are often the developed influences which beset our cradle-heads. The shade of a parent's bad example darkens the whole life of the child, while the light of parental care and teaching will play over the entire path from the cradle to the page 9 grave. It is strange and sad that in a Christian land, a land of churches, chapels, Bibles such as ours, there should be any relevancy in an appeal to mothers to be tender of their children. It is not necessary to train or teach the wildest of wild beasts to tend and nurture their offspring. But many a cry from the cradle of a human creature, is an appeal to a heart all seared by selfishness, an appeal against a neglect and often a brutality of which any but a human brute would be ashamed. It is not brutal. To be brutal, is to be like a brute; but brutes do not neglect their offspring. It is a libel on the zoological creation to call this brutal. It is only the human race who can be thus inhuman. Alas! that they can, and should be lower and baser than the beasts!

But we would not be content with exclaiming against selfishness and neglect; but we would plead in the interests of the cradle for substantial proofs of love. There is many a mother nurses her child and tends it gently. There is many a father loves his little one with all his heart. But too often the love is only sentimental and emotional. The true parental instinct will be speculating on what that infant is to be when it grows up, and longing to educate the expanding faculty, and teach the young idea how to shoot. But when the young idea does begin to shoot, it is too often left to shoot without teaching, to grow up in ignorance, or to learn "life" upon the streets. The true father, whose heart is in its right place, will save a little money from the public house, or out of the pipe-bowl, to send his child to school, and will rob the publican to pay the schoolmaster, and lay a tax upon his bird's eye that his son may get the birch. But more selfish men, those who think it hard to sacrifice a pint or two of stout on the altar of education, will leave the children they have snivelled over in a sentimental page 10 show of love to grow up city Arabs, and be a terror to society. The most truly progressive step which modern legislation can take, is that which will compel every man in England to send his child to school. The cry from the cradle is a cry against ignorance. A cry from a cradle is a prophetic cry, and portends vicissitudes of life and influence most mysterious, and yet most certain. We cannot translate the prophecy, and yet it does lie in our power to mould the future of the child, and to determine destiny to a wondrous extent. If the cry from the cradle be disregarded, or harshly chided, that neglect and harshness will bear fruit in years to come. Suppose the little occupant of that cradle should fight its way through such unkindness, and live in spite of it, the mark of the rough touch will be seen in the coarsened nature, and the jar of the scolding word will be reproduced in the after tones of maturity. If you carry a harp with care, and keep it in a temperate atmosphere, it will reward you by discoursing eloquent music; but if you roughly drag the cords, and put the harp in a cold damp place, it will relax into harsh discords and give forth grating, and not soothing sounds. And so, a child cherished with tenderness and love, will give back that tenderness and repay that love, and will show its fruits in the refinements of its every motion, look, and tone : while a child neglected by a selfish and a loveless parent, and reared amidst scenes of intemperance, and churlish ill-nature, will become the inheritor of the ugly legacy which degenerate trainers have bequeathed. We stand appalled sometimes at the statistics and disclosures of crime in our country; but when we reflect how busily we are engaged in sowing the seed, we need hardly be surprised that we should reap the crop. When we have got over our first surprise that children should grow up at all, there need be little astonishment page 11 that they should grow up what their parents make them. These gin shops at every half-dozen doors in our streets, are garners where the seed of crime for generations is stored and housed. I have stood and watched sometimes, and tried to count how many times the spring-door of one of these places has swung to and fro in an hour. And I have seen it thrust open not only by lusty men, but by young girls, and haggard women, with children trotting shoeless at their side, and babies carried helpless in their arms. Each time I saw that door swing, I seemed to feel as though it swung a human soul into destruction. I saw women with their bottles, smiling and mincing as they went in, and cursing and fighting as they came out; and when the baby squalled its early cry of incipient despair at having been brought into such a world, down went the gin into its throat to stifle it to a sleep, which it were a mercy if it were the sleep of death. And yet while we are permitting this seed to be sown, we hold up our hands, and exclaim about the crime of our great cities. The cry from the cradles of England to-day should be a cry of vengeance, a cry which should denounce the retribution of the whirlwind upon these sowers of the wind, and which should be prophetic of a curse unsoftening in the hoarseness of its emphasis to the third and fourth generation. Children and grandchildren may well shout back their execrations on an ancestry to whose selfish vices they owe poverty, disgrace, and shame; and pay unfilial pilgrimages to graves where the weeds of bitter memory tangle the unhallowed turf, that they may register anathemas, and not prayers, beside degenerate dust.

The cry from the cradle is a cry against drunkenness. Dr. Letheby made some sad disclosures some time ago about infanticide, and showed how mothers strangled, poisoned, drowned their offspring, and the world knew nothing of it. page 12 But, horrible as all this is, there is a more hideous infanticide going on among the children who pass out of babyhood into childhood, and then abruptly spring from childhood into the premature adolescence of iniquity and thiefdom. Better drown a child's body in water than drown its soul in gin. Better poison its life with laudanum, than suffocate its virtue with the fumes of hell Better choke its breath with hemp, than strangle its hopes with vice. Those cries from the cradle which have been drowned with drugs, will hoarsen into curses in the day of retribution. The poor girl who takes her child in her despair down the bridge steps, and kisses it, and then flings it in the river, acts towards it a better mother's part than does that woman who leaves it, screaming in the cradle, to its fate, while she goes off to swill away the last vestige of conscience, and responsibility, and love in the nearest tap-room.

As we have already said, the cry from the cradle protests against ignorance and demands education. It says, "Don't bring me into this world unless you mean to teach me. Don't bring me here to see your vices, to feel your neglect, and then to live to hand on that vice to another generation." Each child that is born is a centre of capacity and possibility for good or ill, and it is therefore as essential that he should be taught within as clothed without. Bread and butter is not the whole of your responsibility to your child. That is but a part of it. The school as well as the pantry is needful for your child. And we are thankful that a Government which has already done many good things, is about to crown all its services to the country by compelling every parent to send his child to school. You and I have no right to rear little elves and goblins to prey upon, and haunt society to its terror and its hurt. If Mr. Wombwell were to bring his menagerie down the New Cut, and page 13 were to leave the tiger's cage open, so that it got out and ran loose and fierce amongst the people, you would not think it an unjust thing if Mr. Wombwell were heavily fined, or even put in jail for his carelessness. And so, if you or I keep a lot of little brats for our amusement, whom we never teach except by a bad example, and whom we leave to stray upon the streets untrained in anything but vice, the law should have the right to make us bolt the door by education, and keep these passions and furies in; it should have a right to say, "The school for the child, or the prison for the parent. If you won't be the guardian of your own flesh and blood, I will take care of the public and of your children too." And, thank heaven, something like this is soon to be done. No one will rejoice in it more than the honest working man. The only people who will object to it will be the thriftless, selfish drones who look upon their children as machines out of which to squeeze the price of a gallon of ale. It used to be a common sound in my ears when I lived in the north, and I daresay you are familiar with it here, when passing along the streets late at night, to hear the shuffling of the feet of some little girl or boy behind you, and then the whimpered plaint of the practised beggar, pouring forth an appeal like this: "O do give me three halfpence, Sir; I have to take home a shilling, and I've only got tenpence halfpenny, and I dare not go back without a shilling, father will beat me; do give me three halfpence, Sir." This sort of thing became so frequent and so hackneyed, that I placed but little faith in it. But I found out upon enquiry, that, though often used simply as a begging cry, it still oftener represented a regular cadging system amongst a certain class of people. They would send their girls of seven and their boys of five years old, barefooted on the midnight streets to beg of passers-by, and page 14 and the pathos of the baby-plea was stimulated by the threat of the weight of the father's fist, or a thick stick across the shoulders if they should fall short of the stipulated sum. They were free to beg it or steal it as best they might; and I have known young children wait for a policeman to come in sight, and then attempt to pick some person's pocket, that they may be taken up, preferring the police-cell to their own homes, and taking more kindly to the prison than to their parent's care. I knew a girl of twelve years old, who now wears irons on her crooked back, who was beaten into crookedness by her own ruffian father, for not having begged the regular sum before she came home. A spinal deformity which she will carry to the grave, attests the cruelty of that father. And he was not a needy man, but a man who could have kept his family in comfort by his own honest work, but who preferred to make his children keep him in drunken idleness by their open beggings and clandestine pilferings. Well, if the law lays hold upon the children of animals like these, and trains them into men and women, who shall say it does not do a good thing? We may, and do expect great things from this measure of compulsory education. But education will not do it all. The three R's will not carry a child through all the requirements of its immortality. Reading, writing, and arithmetic will not take it to heaven. The best arms to lift it there are the arms of prayer. Mothers, let the lullabys with which you familiarise your children's ears, be the hymnals of Christ's praise, and not the thick croonings of coarse indifference. Tell them of that cradle, that manger-cradle, in a place called Bethlehem, concerning which the cry went forth, "Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given." Fathers, tell your little ones of this cradle, and its story. Wise men found its whereabout by the Eastern Star, sailing in the page 15 blue before them. Be ye wise men too, and following that star yourselves carry your children to the bourne to which it lights you. And the light which it shall shed from the cradle to the grave shall be a light which brightens into perfect day; a light which shall not fall upon, but perforate and pierce through the sepulchre, meeting and blending with a purer light beyond where they need no candle neither light of the sun, but where the Lord God giveth them light, and the Lamb is the light thereof.

May God bless you, and your children, and so illuminate your homes below with his grace and love, as that death itself shall make no permanent division; but—

"Father, mother, children, husband, wife,

Together pant in everlasting life."