a little further on—that the statement of one of these scoundrels would lead to the impression that extra prices are charged for these swindling advertisements. If larger prices are charged to men because their advertisements are fraudulent, no amount of false logic or forensic oratory can dispose of the fact that the proprietors of the papers are accessories in any robbery or swindle that is committed; and the insertion of such advertisements, knowing them to be traps for the unwary, at a price which denotes the guilty knowledge of the proprietors, is as gross a breach of the trust reposed in them by the public as was ever committed by smug, well-fed, Sabbath-observing sinners. There is, unfortunately, but too much reason to believe that extra prices are charged for these fool-traps, and that in the most pious and pretentious papers. At the time of the baby-farming disclosures which led to the execution of Margaret Waters, one paper openly accused another—a daily of large circulation—with charging three or four hundred per cent. over the ordinary tariff price for the short applications for nurse children which were then usual. Perhaps the accusation was not worth disproval—at all events it remains uncontradicted till this day. These murderous advertisements presented no particularly destructive features, they simply said in each case that a nurse child was wanted at a certain address; and sometimes an offer would be made to take a baby altogether for a lump sum. This is one of a lot taken from a leading daily paper:—
ADOPTION.—Child Wanted to NURSE, or can be LEFT ALTOGETHER. Terms moderate. Can be taken from birth. Address ——.
Sometimes the terms were mentioned, and, as a rule, the sum named showed that even the tender mercies experienced by Oliver Twist and his friend Dick at the farming establishment inhabited by them could hardly have been expected by the most confiding