FullReads

The Baby became ill. A nobleman discovered him and laid his case before a magistrate. The papers made a sensation on the Baby’s case. There was a terrific hullabaloo. An inquiry was held. The guardians became furious. “The reports of their proceedings read like the vagaries of a lunatic asylum or the deliberations of the American Senate.” They discharged the kindly master. The Baby was locked in a room. Food was passed to him on a stick. The inquiry was denounced and the bewildered public gnashed its teeth at everybody who had anything to do with, or say of, Ginx’s Baby. “At last St. Bartemeus’ parish had to keep him and the guardians, keeping carefully within the law, neglected nothing that could sap little Ginx’s vitality, deaden his instincts, derange moral action, cause hope to die within his infant breast almost as soon as it was born.” Every pauper was to them an obnoxious charge to be reduced to a MINIMUM or NIL. The Baby’s constitution alone prevented his reduction to NIL.

The bill of costs against St. Bartemeus was 1,600 pounds. Just as it was taxed, one of the persons who had deserted Ginx’s Baby was arrested for theft. The Baby’s clothes, given by the Duchess, were found in this person’s possession. She confessed all about the Baby, and so the guardians traced the Baby’s father and delivered to Ginx, through an agent, the famous child, with the benediction–“There he is; damn him!”

Mrs. Ginx couldn’t recognize the Baby. His brothers and sisters would have nothing to do with him. Ginx took the Baby out one night, left it on the steps of a large building in Pall Mall, and slunk away out of the pages of “this strange, eventful history.” The Baby piped. The door of the house, a club, opened and the baby was taken in. It was the Radical Club, but it was as conservative as it could be in its reception of the waif, and it was only in perfunctory kindness that the Club gave him shelter. The Fogey Club heard of the Baby and bethought itself of making campaign material of him. The Fogies instructed their “organs” to dilate upon the disgraceful apathy of the Radicals toward the foundling. The Fogies kidnapped the Baby; the Radicals stole him back. The Baby was again a great “question.” However, other questions supervened, although it was understood that Sir Charles Sterling was “to get a night” to bring up the case of Ginx’s Baby in Parliament. Associations were formed in the metropolis for disposing of Ginx’s Baby by expatriation or otherwise. A peer suddenly sprung the matter by proposing to send the Baby to the Antipodes at the expense of the nation. The question was debated with elaborate stilted stultitude and the noble lord withdrew his motion.

The Baby tired of life at the clubs. He borrowed some clothes, some forks, some spoons, without leave, and then took his leave. No attempt was made to recover him. He was fifteen. “He pitted his wits against starvation.” He found the world terribly full everywhere he went. He went through a career of penury, of honest and dishonest callings, of ‘scapes and captures, imprisonments and other punishments.

Midnight on Vauxhall Bridge! The form of a man emerged from the dark and outlined itself against the haze of sky. There was a dull flash of a face in the gloom. The shadow leaped far out into the night. Splash! “Society, which, in the sacred names of Law and Charity, forbade the father to throw his child over Vauxhall Bridge, at a time when he was alike unconscious of life and death, has at last driven him over the parapet into the greedy waters.”

The questions of the book I have condensed here are as alive to-day as are thousands of other Ginx’s Babies in all our big cities. While philanthropists and politicians, priests and preachers, men and women theorize about the questions, the questions grow “more insoluble.” What is to be done? is the first question. How is it to be done is a question which is secondary and its discussion is useless until the first is settled. Too much State drove Ginx’s Baby into the Thames. What’s everybody’s business is nobody’s business. If the uncountable babies of innumerable Ginx’s are to be aided, some one must aid them for the mere pleasure there is in loving-kindness.