because they durst not venture back to their drunken, miserable, desperate parents?  I could tell things at which angels might shed tears, with much better reason for doing so than seems to me to exist in some of those more imposing occasions on which bombastic writers are wont to describe them as weeping.  Ah, there is One who knows where the responsibility for all this rests!  Not wholly with the wretched parents:  far from that. They, too, have gone through the like:  they had as little chance as their children. They deserve our deepest pity, too.  Perhaps the deeper pity is not due to the shivering, starving child, with the bitter wind cutting through its thin rags, and its blue feet on the frozen pavement, holding out a hand that is like the claw of some beast; but rather to the brutalized mother who could thus send out the infant she bore.  Surely the mother’s condition, if we look at the case aright, is the more deplorable.  Would not you, my reader, rather endure any degree of cold and hunger than come to this?  Doubtless, there is blame somewhere, that such things should be:  but we all know that the blame of the most miserable practical evils and failures can hardly be traced to particular individuals.  It is through the incapacity of scores of public servants that an army is starved.  It is through the fault of millions of people that our great towns are what they are:  and it must be confessed that the actual responsibility is spread so thinly over so great a surface that it is hard to say it rests very blackly upon any one spot.  Oh that we could but know whom to hang, when we find some flagrant, crying evil!  Unluckily, hasty people are ready to be content, if they can but hang anybody, without minding much whether that individual be more to blame than many beside.  Laws and kings have something to do here:  but management and foresight on the part of the poorer classes have a great deal more to do.  And no laws can make many persons managing or provident.  I do not hesitate to say, from what I have myself seen of the poor, that the same short-sighted extravagance, the same recklessness of consequences, which are frequently found in them, would cause quite as much misery, if they prevailed in a like degree among people with a thousand a year.  But it seems as if only the tolerably well-to-do have the heart to be provident and self-denying.  A man with a few hundreds annually does not marry, unless he thinks he can afford it:  but the workman with fifteen shillings a week is profoundly indifferent to any such calculation.  I firmly believe that the sternest of all self-denial is that practised by those who, when we divide mankind into rich and poor, must be classed (I suppose) with the rich.  But I turn away from a miserable subject, through which I cannot see my way clearly, and on which I cannot think but with unutterable pain.  It is an easy way of cutting the knot, to declare that the rich are the cause of all the sufferings