[ IO ]

the whole country indeed had to be apportioned out into districts of100,000 population. London people and Birmingham people hadto be taught to regard children not as London children andBirmingham children, but as English children. The scope of feelingand protection had to be all the helplessly and needlessly wretchedlittle subjects of the Queen throughout the Queen’s kingdom.Everywhere, ignorance of facts had to be confronted, and limits oflocal responsibility had to be broken down, before the difficultieswhich stood between us and dealing with the hidden and wide-spread cruelties to children could be overcome, and a uniform,universal and adequate system could put the new law into force.

Its existence is not, therefore, of a “ Parent Society ” with“ affiliated ” offspring. It has no parent, it has no affiliatedoffspring. It is one body with limbs, one mind with eyes andhands manifold to see with and to work with. All subscribers aresubscribers to one Society. All its Committees are parts, vitalparts, of one organisation. However small, however great the part,it has a common life, a common right, a common resource for itsnecessities, legal and financial.

Its System of Legal Proceedings.

To-day, there is such a system established in over one-half of theland, covering some 20,000,000 of its population, including city andhamlet—225 centres from which protective operations are carried on,and over a hundred inspectors of unfortunate child-life.

Along with this conversion of ignorance into knowledge, andlocal feeling into the wider and national range of the Society’sfeeling, a plan had to be devised by which every case dealt withby a committee in a Court should be dealt with with success. Themost wholesome and righteous pity for a child, and indignation atits wrong-doers, to be able to secure the help of the law in puttingthe wrong-doing down, must conform to the strictest requirements ofthe law. And as Court-proceedings against wrong-doers which fail,strengthen the particular wrong-doers’ hands, and encourage others’wrong-doing, it is clear that the question whether the new move-ment should be for evil or for good depended very much on everyCommittee of the Society having the means of successful proceedingsin Court. Many and subtle and exceptional are the difficulties anddangers which beset legal dealings with domestic crimes. Numerousfailures in those dealings would discredit the movement, deprive itof its necessary moral and financial support, and determine theshortness and misery of its life.

And now, what in its proceedings in Court has been the fate of