over half the brute creation on its way into the ark; or how one
little dimpled arm has mowed down (as I saw myself) the whole tin
soldiery of Europe. On the walls of these rooms are graceful,
pleasant, bright, childish pictures. At the bed’s heads, are
pictures of the figure which is the universal embodiment of all
mercy and compassion, the figure of Him who was once a child
himself, and a poor one. Besides these little creatures on the
beds, you may learn in that place that the number of small Outpatients
brought to that house for relief is no fewer than ten
thousand in the compass of one single year. In the room in which
these are received, you may see against the wall a box, on which it
is written, that it has been calculated, that if every grateful
mother who brings a child there will drop a penny into it, the
Hospital funds may possibly be increased in a year by so large a
sum as forty pounds. And you may read in the Hospital Report, with
a glow of pleasure, that these poor women are so respondent as to
have made, even in a toiling year of difficulty and high prices,
this estimated forty, fifty pounds. In the printed papers of this
same Hospital, you may read with what a generous earnestness the
highest and wisest members of the medical profession testify to the
great need of it; to the immense difficulty of treating children in
the same hospitals with grown-up people, by reason of their
different ailments and requirements, to the vast amount of pain
that will be assuaged, and of life that will be saved, through this
Hospital; not only among the poor, observe, but among the
prosperous too, by reason of the increased knowledge of children’s
illnesses, which cannot fail to arise from a more systematic mode
of studying them. Lastly, gentlemen, and I am sorry to say, worst
of all – (for I must present no rose-coloured picture of this place
to you – I must not deceive you;) lastly, the visitor to this
Children’s Hospital, reckoning up the number of its beds, will find
himself perforce obliged to stop at very little over thirty; and
will learn, with sorrow and surprise, that even that small number,
so forlornly, so miserably diminutive, compared with this vast
London, cannot possibly be maintained, unless the Hospital be made
better known; I limit myself to saying better known, because I will
not believe that in a Christian community of fathers and mothers,
and brothers and sisters, it can fail, being better known, to be
well and richly endowed.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, this, without a word of adornment –
which I resolved when I got up not to allow myself – this is the
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
simple case. This is the pathetic case which I have to put to you;
not only on behalf of the thousands of children who annually die in
this great city, but also on behalf of the thousands of children
who live half developed, racked with preventible pain, shorn of
their natural capacity for health and enjoyment. If these innocent
creatures cannot move you for themselves, how can I possibly hope
to move you in their name? The most delightful paper, the most
charming essay, which the tender imagination of Charles Lamb
conceived, represents him as sitting by his fireside on a winter
night telling stories to his own dear children, and delighting in
their society, until he suddenly comes to his old, solitary,
bachelor self, and finds that they were but dream-children who
might have been, but never were. “We are nothing,” they say to
him; “less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have
been, and we must wait upon the tedious shore of Lethe, millions of
ages, before we have existence and a name.” “And immediately
awaking,” he says, “I found myself in my arm chair.” The dreamchildren
whom I would now raise, if I could, before every one of
you, according to your various circumstances, should be the dear
child you love, the dearer child you have lost, the child you might