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Meditation
Ontario now has nineteen thousand children in its foster care system,
nearly half crown wards who will never see their parents again. To sustain
these numbers, it is entirely reasonable that a tenth of Ontario's children
will spend at least part of their childhood in the hellish conditions of
foster care. The following bleak quote by an unknown author foretells the
future awaiting us as they mature.
Nothing that we could say could add to the impressiveness of the lesson
furnished by the events of the past year, as to the needs and the
dangerous condition of the neglected classes in our city. Those terrible
days in July - - the sudden appearance, as if from the bosom of the earth,
of a most infuriated and degraded mob; the helplessness of property
holders and the better classes; ... immense destruction of property - -
were the first dreadful revelations to many of our people of the existence
among us of a great, ignorant, irresponsible class who were growing up
here without any permanent interest in the welfare of the community or the
success of the government.... It should be remembered that there are no
dangers to the value of property, or to the permanency of our
institutions, so great as those from the existence of such a class of
vagabond, ignorant, and ungoverned children. This 'dangerous class' has
not begun to show itself as it will in eight or ten years when these boys
and girls are matured. Those who were too negligent or too selfish to
notice them as children, will be fully aware of them as men. They will
vote. They will have the same rights as we ourselves, though they have
grown up ignorant of moral principle.... They will poison society. They
will perhaps be embittered at the wealth and the luxuries they never
share. Then let society beware, when the outcasts, vicious, reckless
multitude ... swarming now in every foul alley and low street, come to
know their power and use it.
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