About a
fortnight after his mother had introduced him into the world,
she returned to her factory and put her infant out to nurse,
that is to say, paid threepence a week to an old woman who
takes charge of these new-born babes for the day, and gives
them back at night to their mothers as they hurriedly return
from the scene of their labour to the dungeon or the den,
which is still by courtesy called "home." The expense is not
great: laudanum and treacle, administered in the shape of some
popular elixir, affords these innocents a brief taste of the
sweets of existence, and keeping them quiet, prepares them for
the silence of their impending grave. Infanticide is
practised as extensively and as legally in England, as it is
on the banks of the Ganges; a circumstance which apparently
has not yet engaged the attention of the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. But the vital
principle is an impulse from an immortal artist, and sometimes
baffles, even in its tenderest phasis, the machinations of
society for its extinction. There are infants that will defy
even starvation and poison, unnatural mothers and demon
nurses. Such was the nameless one of whom we speak.
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