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10
and modern officialism is nothing if it cannot disturb
the community, and expose its social sores to the
public eye.
Apparently the common louse has become such a
terrible fellow, that no one authority is sufficient and
competent to deal with him. Different departments
and routine services must be called in to inspect, and
tabulate and analyse and figure about him. It is of
course a detail that amongst all this "procedure" the
mere interest of the child may be overlooked.
Members of your Committee will recollect more
than one case where more officers were concerned than
there were vermin on the child in question. In the
midst of all the enquiries and research over a poor
motherless bairn, a good kindly neighbour just took
the child and cleansed it. This practical person did
not of course understand the position at all. Her
emphatic action simply cut short a most interesting
case, and ruined perhaps a whole table of figures.
One wonders why it is that all these fussy people
do not understand and take the trouble to learn that
these poor children are the victims of circumstance,
subject for compassionate assistance and real help
rather than meddlesome officiousness, leading to
nothing except perhaps more statistics and reports.
If they could be got to see and know that
hundreds of these children have never had a complete
set of clothes or under-linen in their lives; that they
have no change of body clothes from day to night,
and in hundreds of cases sleep in the one miserable set