Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 5).djvu/173

 No. XX.—DR. BARNARDO, F.R.C.S. Ed.

HEN it is remembered that the Homes founded and governed by Dr. Barnardo comprise fifty distinct institutions; that since the foundation of the first Home, twenty-eight years ago, in Stepney, over 22,000 boys and girls have been rescued from positions of almost indescribable danger; that to-day five thousand orphans and destitute children, constituting the largest family in the world, are being cared for, trained, and put on a different footing to that of shoeless and stockingless, it will be at once understood that a definite and particular direction must be chosen in which to allow one's thoughts and investigations to travel. I immediately select the babies—the little ones of five years old and under; and it is possible that ere the last words of this paper are written, the Doctor may have disappeared from these pages, and we may find ourselves in fancy romping and playing with the babes in the green fields one day last summer.

There is no misjudging the character of Dr. Barnardo—there is no misinterpreting his motives. Somewhat below the medium height, strong and stoutly built, with an expression at times a little severe, but with benevolent-looking eyes, which immediately scatter the lines of severity: he at once impresses you as a man of immovable disposition and intentions not to be cast aside. He sets his heart on having a thing done. It is done. He conceives some new departure of rescue work. There is no rest for him until it is accomplished. His rapidity of speech tells of continual activity of mind. He is essentially a business man—he needs must be. He takes a waif in hand, and makes a man or woman of it in a very few years. Why should the child's unparentlike parent now come forward and claim it once more for a life of misery and probable crime? Dr. Barnardo thinks long before he would snap the parental ties between mother and child; but if neglect, cruelty, or degradation towards her offspring have been the chief evidences of her relationship, nothing in the wide world would stop him from taking the little one up and holding it fast.

I sat down to chat over the very wide subject of child rescue in Dr. Barnardo's cosy room at Stepney Causeway. It was a bitter cold night outside, the streets were frozen, the snow falling. In an hour's time we were to start for the slums—to see baby life in the vicinity of Flower and Dean Street, Brick Lane, and Wentworth Street—all typical localities where the fourpenny