Some years ago, being in Scotland, I went with one of the most humane members of the humane medical profession, on a morning tour among some of the worst lodged inhabitants of the old town of Edinburgh.In the closes and wynds of that picturesque place - Iam sorry to remind you what fast friends picturesqueness and typhus often are - we saw more poverty and sickness in an hour than many people would believe in a life.Our way lay from one to another of the most wretched dwellings, reeking with horrible odours; shut out from the sky, shut out from the air, mere pits and dens.In a room in one of these places, where there was an empty porridge-pot on the cold hearth, with a ragged woman and some ragged children crouching on the bare ground near it - where, I remember as Ispeak, that the very light, refracted from a high damp-stained and time-stained house-wall, came trembling in, as if the fever which had shaken everything else there had shaken even it - there lay, in an old egg-box which the mother had begged from a shop, a little feeble, wasted, wan, sick child.With his little wasted face, and his little hot, worn hands folded over his breast, and his little bright, attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I have seen him for several years, look in steadily at us.There he lay in his little frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the little body from which he was slowly parting - there he lay, quite quiet, quite patient, saying never a word.He seldom cried, the mother said; he seldom complained; "he lay there, seemin' to woonder what it was a'
aboot." God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had his reasons for wondering - reasons for wondering how it could possibly come to be that he lay there, left alone, feeble and full of pain, when he ought to have been as bright and as brisk as the birds that never got near him - reasons for wondering how he came to be left there, a little decrepid old man pining to death, quite a thing of course, as if there were no crowds of healthy and happy children playing on the grass under the summer's sun within a stone's throw of him, as if there were no bright, moving sea on the other side of the great hill overhanging the city; as if there were no great clouds rushing over it; as if there were no life, and movement, and vigour anywhere in the world - nothing but stoppage and decay.There he lay looking at us, saying, in his silence, more pathetically than I have ever heard anything said by any orator in my life, "Will you please to tell me what this means, strange man? and if you can give me any good reason why I should be so soon, so far advanced on my way to Him who said that children were to come into His presence and were not to be forbidden, but who scarcely meant, I think, that they should come by this hard road by which I am travelling; pray give that reason to me, for Iseek it very earnestly and wonder about it very much;" and to my mind he has been wondering about it ever since.Many a poor child, sick and neglected, I have seen since that time in this London;many a poor sick child I have seen most affectionately and kindly tended by poor people, in an unwholesome house and under untoward circumstances, wherein its recovery was quite impossible; but at all such times I have seen my poor little drooping friend in his egg-box, and he has always addressed his dumb speech to me, and Ihave always found him wondering what it meant, and why, in the name of a gracious God, such things should be!
Now, ladies and gentlemen, such things need not be, and will not be, if this company, which is a drop of the life-blood of the great compassionate public heart, will only accept the means of rescue and prevention which it is mine to offer.Within a quarter of a mile of this place where I speak, stands a courtly old house, where once, no doubt, blooming children were born, and grew up to be men and women, and married, and brought their own blooming children back to patter up the old oak staircase which stood but the other day, and to wonder at the old oak carvings on the chimney-pieces.
In the airy wards into which the old state drawing-rooms and family bedchambers of that house are now converted are such little patients that the attendant nurses look like reclaimed giantesses, and the kind medical practitioner like an amiable Christian ogre.