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The officer declares this is quite contrary to law and he recites the law, but that doesn’t affect Ginx. He fails utterly to see why, if Parliament will not let him abandon the child, Parliament does not provide for the child; for all the other twelve. The officer declares that the parish has enough to do to take care of foundlings and children of parents who can’t or won’t work. Says Ginx: “Jest so. You’ll bring up bastards and beggars’ pups but you won’t help an honest man keep his head above water. This child’s head is goin’ under water anyhow!” and he dashed for the bridge, with the screaming crowd at his heels.

A philosopher interposes at this stage with a query as to how Ginx came to have so many children. Of course Ginx had to laugh. The philosopher urges that Ginx had no right to bring children into the world unless he could feed, clothe and educate them, and Ginx replies that he’s like to know how he could help it, as a married man. The philosopher goes over the old, old tale of rationalism in life. Ginx should not have married a poor woman, should not have gone on sub-dividing his resources by the increase of what must be a degenerate offspring, should not have married at all.

“Ginx’s face grew dark. He was thinking of ‘all those years’ and the poor creature that, from morning to night and Sunday to Sunday, in calm and storm, had clung to his rough affections; and the bright eyes and the winding arms so often trellised over his tremendous form, and the coy tricks and laughter that had cheered so many tired hours. He may have been much of a brute, but he felt that, after all, that sort of thing was denied to dogs and pigs.”

The philosopher could not answer these thoughts nor the rejoinder question to his own: what is a man or woman to do that doesn’t marry?

And so the argument proceeds, the philosopher losing ground all the time because his rationality is based upon changing man’s nature, not on making something out of “what’s nateral to human beings.” The act of parliament idea of solving the problem is riddled effectively by a stonemason, who points out that the head-citizen is not so worthy as the heart-citizen. In brief, the philosopher is routed by the doctrine that love is better than law.

Ginx proceeds to the river again, but is stopped by a nun who asks for the child. She uncovers the queer ruby face and kisses it. After this Ginx could not have touched a hair of the child’s head. His purpose dies but his perplexity is alive. The nun takes the child, and Ginx, in gratitude for her assurance that the child shall not be sent back to him, stands treat for the crowd. The child’s life in the convent is material for some good satiric writing upon the question of his salvation. The picture is absurdly over-drawn so far as its effectiveness against conventional charity is concerned, but it touches the question of religious bigotry surely and strongly. Indeed the method of treatment here verges closely upon the Rabelaisian, as where the sisters want to make the sign of the cross upon Mrs. Ginx’s breasts before allowing the baby to suck. Mrs. Ginx refused “the Papish idolaters” and the Protestant Detectoral Association is brought to the rescue of the child from superstition.

A little man with a keen Roman nose–he could scent Jesuits a mile off–took up the cause of the child and it got into court. The matter became a cause celebre. London was in a turmoil over “the Papal abduction.” The author sketches it all graphically with a convincing fidelity of caricature. The “Sisters of Misery” triumphed. They retained the baby. Then after attempting to sanctify the baby–a ceremony wholly imaginary and described with a smutch of revolting coarseness–the sisters send the baby packing back to the Protestant Detectoral Association.