Dr. Barnardo, the father of "nobody's children" : a sketch / [W.T. Stead].

  • William Thomas Stead
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. Barnardo, the father of "nobody's children" : a sketch / [W.T. Stead]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    It is not so many years ago since they scalped Benjamin Waugh. But to-day the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has no firmer friends than Mr. Labouchere and Mr. Voules. And knowing all three men as I do, I have not the slightest hesitation in predicting that before long Truth will discover Dr. Barnardo to be what he is, and recognise his work to be one of the best things achieved in our time. To effect this transformation what is necessary ? Only one thing. That the good gentlemen who in their shady retreats at Twickenham and at Brighton prepare or sanction smashing articles intended to roast Barnardo, should spend one hot July day seeing the actual work that Dr. Barnardo is doing for the destitute children. Mr, Labouchere expends on his daughter, Mr. Youles on his son, the wealth of loving fatherhood which is quite enough to enable them to sympathise and under¬ stand the paternal love which enables Dr. Barnardo to care for five thousand of nobody’s children whom he has saved from the gutter. The work is there. It speaks for itself. Every one of these five thousand small children is an epistle that can be known and read of all men. And one day among them all would change the whole tone of Truth's references to Dr. Barnardo. “ Ignorance, blank ignorance”—Dr. Johnson’s excuse for making a mistake in defining in his dictionary —is no doubt the excuse they would make after the first hour’s actual contact with the real work that is going on at Stepney and Ilford. And as they pictured to them¬ selves their own bairns, sweltering and hungry, mal¬ treated and homeless as these other bairns were, and would have been but for Dr. Barnardo, they would change front with the thoroughness and courage which distinguish them. GIRL WAIFS— SEEKING ADMISSION. one has now become a thousand, and in place of twenty-five homeless boys he has now 5,000 boys and girls in his Homes. But although Dr. Barnardo has been the cultivator of the crop from which this great harvest has been reaped, the message from the Lord came by little Jim —little Jim Jervis, the first of a procession of over 34,000 of the Don’t-Live-Nowheres who, thanks to his message, have since been homed and saved. PART II.—FROM TRIALS TO TRIUMPH. I.—THE MESSENGER FROM SATAN. Now I must make a leap of thirty-two years, and come down to the present day to meet the thought of many who on reading the foregoing pages will ask themselves, “ But is there not something wrong about Barnardo ? We hare got an idea that Labby has his knife into him somewhere.” So, discarding all chronological order, and leaping at once to the point, I will say a few words in passing on this question. Mr. Labouchere and his indefatigable lieu¬ tenant, Mr. Horace Youles, used to tomahawk General Booth and the Salvation Army. Now there is not a more useful backer of the Salva¬ tionists in all London than the editor of Truth! A LITTLE STREET VENDOR—HOMELESS AND FRIENDLESS. DTO-vr-n from |j FE IN THE HALL AT STEPNEY.