Without Natural Affection.
The following recital is almost too horrible for belief, yet it does not come forth attended with any circumstances, calculated to throw discredit upon it. If it was written in party or political interests, its statements might be taken with considerable limitation; but no such motives can be involved in it; and besides, it appears in the N. Y. Tribune, a paper usually reliable and accurate in its statements. The apostle has told us that one sign which would show when we were living in the last days would be, that people would be without natural affection. A picture far less revolting than the following would be an ample fulfilment of the apostle's prediction. If all the characteristics of the last days, are to be brought out with the same terrible intensity, we are truly living in fearful times. But we cannot expect any improvement till the reign of righteousness is brought in; for men will continue to shut out from their hearts, more and more, the restraining influence of the grace of God. And have we not occasion, even now, in the language of the prophet, to cry and sigh for the abominations done in the land? Let us be thankful that a change of dispensation is near. The Tribune says: “It is getting to be a serious question among Christian men and women whether we ought not to have a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. We had not recovered from the sickening horrors of the case of the Rev. Mr. Lindsey, who whipped his little son to death because the child would not say his prayers, when we were called upon the other day to record a frightful instance of child torture near Hackensack, N. J., which fortunately came to the authorities before it had culminated in downright murder. A man and his wife, named Vanderbilt, had taken an orphan child, one Mary Ann Farrell, from an asylum, for the purpose of employing her as a servant. For about eleven months the husband knocked her about with a broomstick, and the wife beat her about with an iron dipper. They used to take her to the cellar, strip her naked, tie her up by the wrists, lash her with a horsewhip till the blood ran down her limbs, and then rub the raw flesh with brine. She made her escape at last, and was found one morning in the open fields, with bare feet and legs, and wearing only a single thin undergarment, so saturated with blood and filth that it had to be peeled from her body like a scab. She appeared in court with evidences of torture so pitiful on her person that stout men wept at the spectacle. Her jaw had been broken; her hair had been torn out by handfuls; her face was swollen and deformed; her lips were cut open; her eyes were blackened and scarred; her whole body was bruised and discolored. Little wonder that the neighbors were with difficulty restrained from wreaking lynch-law vengeance on the authors of the outrage. “The same day we reported the discovery of the dead body of an infant in an alley way in this city. Its throat had been cut from ear to ear; the head was nearly severed from the body; there were three or four cuts about the neck, as if inflicted by the trembling, hurried hand of a woman. On that day also another case of infanticide was added to the long list which disgraces our annual police calendar. An unknown woman was seen to drop a bundle in Twenty-sixth street. When opened it was found to contain the murdered body of a child, killed by strangulation. “One of the most shocking and inhuman child-murders that we ever read of occurred in the early part of March, in Warsaw, Indiana. An abandoned woman named Hines, apprenticed her little boy, four years of age, to a Mr. and Mrs. Harl. They were to have kept the boy until he was of age; but the process of ‘conquering’ him which the man Harl immediately commenced, was too severe for so tender a baby, and death relieved him of the charge at the end of four weeks. The day after his introduction to his new home the poor infant was whipped with a ‘black snake whip,’ because he did not know his letters. He was scourged with a knotted waggon-whip, beaten with straps, knocked out of his chair for falling asleep, bruised with clubs and bits of board until his flesh was like jelly. One day the brute Harl hanged him by the waist from a hook in the wall, took off his shoes and stockings, and kindled a fire under the soles of his feet. When the flames began to die out, the child's mother, who was present, was compelled, with dreadful threats, to bring fresh coals. This torture lasted nearly half an hour. Then the sufferer was taken down and tied to a bed post. Spent with pain, he fell asleep; for this crime he was locked up half naked for two hours and a half, on a cold February day, in a cellar. At night the executioner dipped his head in a bucket of water and imprisoned him again in the cellar. Then he turned him out of doors in his shirt and trousers. After the burning, said Harl's wife, in her testimony in court, ‘the child was not able to run around as well as usual.’ Sometimes, as a variation of the torture, the boy was hanged up by the heels. One day, after he had been whipped as usual, he seemed ‘very poorly;’ he ‘did not talk any,’ and at noon he was put to bed. Early in the evening Harl sent his wife to her room. It was very late when he followed her. ‘We had no conversation that night,’ says Mrs. Harl; ‘the child was not there in the morning.’ Mrs. Hines, the mother, suspected foul play, and applied to a magistrate. A search was made, and the body of the poor boy was found in a trunk at the bottom of a well. Harl made his escape, but has since been captured. The women were both arrested, and tried as accomplices in the murder. They were acquitted, after an examination, which seems to show that the mother, who had done little or nothing to prevent the foul cruelty which had been exercised under her very eyes, was the worst criminal of the three. “A few days ago a German carpenter was arrested in Chicago on a charge of whipping his daughter to death. The neighbors, alarmed at the horrid outcries of the little sufferer, sent word to the police; when the officers entered the house, the man and his wife were absent, and the child was found dead, lying on her face upon a bed. Her back was a mass of wounds; her garments were saturated with blood; her neck was purple with marks of a clutched hand; the eyes were open, and the face was distorted with agony. “These things are almost too sickening for comment. We used to believe that the wholesale killing of children by slow torture was a refinement of wickedness in which England led the world; but the records of the last year or two go far to transfer the bad pre-eminence to ourselves. Murder by the lash seems almost to have become an epidemic, and one of the worst features in the case is that women are so often implicated in the unnatural brutality. A state of society in which such horrors can become frequent, such ineffable crimes be perpetrated by parents on their own offspring, cries out to Heaven for signal punishment, with a cry to which God cannot long be deaf.”