In partnership with the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition BC, Canadian Physicians for Life has released a 24 minute video presenting a candid look at the arguments and realities surrounding euthanasia. " Who Gets. The Last Word? New Ideas about Euthanasia " discusses the risks to the elderly, disabled and terminally ill specifically, and to health care and society generally, of legalizing euthanasia.

The production includes interviews with the general public, as well as lawyer and former director of the BC Cerebral Palsy Association Halldor Bjarnason, philosophy and ethics professor Dr. Paul Chamberlain, mother and community living advocate Anita Dadson, family physician and BCMA past president Dr. Jim Lane, rehabilitation counselor Walter Lawrence, social worker Sally Martin, and others.

With the Latimer case set to be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada early next year, this video is a timely and valuable educational tool suitable to present to policy makers and politicians, seniors groups, students and anyone who may be ambivalent on this current and urgent issue.

"It's critical that we understand if physician-assisted suicide is legalized it will impose a devastating burden upon the most vulnerable members of our society: the elderly, the terminally ill and the disabled. It will put them in a position where now, amidst all the stresses that they already face-in addition to all of that, we will impose the burden where now their own continued existence is a choice they must make." Dr. Paul Chamberlain

"Who will make a decision for a person at the end of their life? Will it be made by an administrator of a hospital who's balancing budgets? This scares me.

.palliative care is the choice we should be promoting and encouraging across the country as the right for all citizens." Dr. Jim Lane

" The entire act of euthanasia is based on a judgement call based on the assumption that the person is in too much pain to live any longer. Or their life is not worth living any more. But the problem is that opinion is based on the person who is going to be doing the killing, and not the individual him self ." Halldor Bjarnason

"It's alarming to me that we would be talking in the case of euthanasia about giving even more power, not to the patient, not to the person suffering, but to the caregivers. And not power to help, but power to kill." Dr. Will Johnston

". if euthanasia were legalized in our country, most people would lose more rights than they'd ever gain." Dr. Jim Lane

"Who Gets.The Last Word? New Ideas about Euthanasia" can be ordered from our office for a total cost of $10 per copy.   Members are encouraged to donate a video to hospital, school and public libraries.

The September 4, 1999, issue of the British medical journal Lancet reports the results of a study which contends that terminal cancer patients have second thoughts once they have expressed a desire to die. The research, by Dr. Harvey Max Chochinov, Professor of Psychiatry and Family Medicine, Division of Palliative Care, University of Manitoba, found that "the will to live in terminal patients can fluctuate wildly over periods as short as 12 hours in response to physical or psychological distress."

Dr. Chochinov noted that this is the "first time anyone has tried to measure the will to live amongst patients nearing the end of their lives." Dr. Chochinov and his team tested the will to live of 168 patients with terminal cancer at the Riverview Palliative Care Unit in Winnipeg. Patients ranged in age from 31 to 89 years old and were assessed for mental acuity before being admitted to the study. Once enrolled, they were surveyed twice a day for an average of 27 days.

T he study was funded by the Canadian Cancer Society, The Open Society Institute, and Project Death in America.

Conscientious objection is an ongoing concern for pro-life healthcare providers. Efforts to safeguard our freedom of choice and prevent discrimination, in the form of "Protection of Conscience" legislation, are being proposed at various levels of government in Canada.

The following testimony written August 11, 1999, by Dr. Katherine Schlaerth is published with her permission.

Dr. Schlaerth would be grateful to hear from physicians in Canada (in confidence) who have similarly endured discrimination. She is writing an article on nurses, MD's and others in the medical profession who have either lost positions, failed to be hired or endured risk to their medical school grades because of their prolife views.

According to Dr. Schlaerth, ". the issue needs more light shone on it."   We agree.

I'll soon be leaving my position in the Department of Family Medicine at a premier private university medical school in Southern California, in large part because of a weather-beaten couple who came into the clinic early one morning with an urgent request for a common drug used mostly for stomach ailments. Their demands were made loudly and urgently and accompanied by a pathetic tale of bedside vigils with a family member whose illness was potentially life-threatening. Worry had worn the mother to a frazzle, and she'd decided the only solution to the stress in her life was to abort the "accidental pregnancy" she'd carried for over a month and a half. She was obliged with a prescription, from another physician, for a common anti-cancer drug called methotrexate, which she was gravely warned would damage her fetus, making termination mandatory. She must not miss her next appointment for the drug which would complete the work of the first.

I did not give her the second drug, nor did I give her an appointment to get it. Somehow, another physician magically appeared and was most happy to comply with the by now infuriated patients' request, probably summoned frantically by the clerk who saw the makings of a conflict of momentous proportions.

After this event, I got to thinking. Abortions were now being done in the back room of our facility, and resident physicians were learning the procedures. I'd brought up the point that abortions sat ill with patients who may be in the very same clinic for infertility problems, and most mothers would not especially like to have their toddlers vaccinated right next door to where kids a year or so younger were being snuffed. My economically based protestations got nowhere.

Though being named teacher of the year two weeks prior by our family medicine residents and seeing the largest number of patients of all the providers assigned to our clinic, I realized that my economic and teaching attributes paled in importance to the right of the abortionists in our group practice to empty whatever uteruses they pleased, under whatever conditions they pleased. It was time for me to say, with great heaviness of heart, "sayonara."

My story is far from unique. Another physician faced exactly the same situation at the state university which is known as our cross-town rival, and also submitted his resignation rather than work in a clinic where abortion on demand was practiced. Up north in the San Francisco Bay area, a physician who was the mother and sole support of three young children related in a whisper how she would try to talk young girls into avoiding premarital sex, or into carrying a pregnancy to term, but feared that any open acknowledgement of her pro-life persuasion would mean loss of her job. Nurses and other health care providers who object to abortions are similarly harassed, forced to resign, or ridiculed in many areas of our fair state and nation.

What does this mean for the public? As more and more health care workers who have a life ethic that values each individual are systematically discouraged from practicing their beliefs, and as attrition forced by a hostile workplace depletes their numbers, young doctors and nurses are increasingly taught by those who believe that life has little value when it is not perfect, or is not desired by others. At this time, in Oregon, a law exists which legalizes physician-assisted suicide. A similar bill is under active consideration in the California State Assembly. Already I've had patients who fear that admission to the hospital will put their care in the hands of those who may end their lives if cure doesn ' t seem possible. Fortunately, at the current time, this possibility is rather remote.

But will that always be the case? In Holland, terminations have increased in number and safeguards have decreased over the years. Damaged newborns are snuffed if their parents consent. Back at Princeton, the new Chair of the Ethics Department actually espouses the killing of babies with major congenial problems. Medicine's philosophy is slowly swinging from allegiance to the individual patient towards duty to the larger community. People believe the world is becoming too crowded. The logical outcome of a simultaneous consideration of these two factors is decreasing attention to the medical needs of patients considered too much of a social burden.

Football season will never be the same again. When I hear the strains of our beloved "Conquest," played by our marching band decked out in the plumbed helmets as our white mascot gallops proudly around the track, there will be pride in our football warriors, but it will be mixed with sadness. Our Trojan horse looks beautiful on the outside, but I know that inside our institution, the values of a culture which thinks only of its own convenience supersede those which acknowledge the value of each individual to live his or her life as planned by the Author of all life from the beginning of time.

S hakespeare was wrong. To solve our collective problems, we don't first kill all the lawyers. We first kill all of those we think might grow up to be criminals.

That is the inescapable conclusion reached in an unpublished study circulating among economists and "experts" in criminal law. The study suggests that since abortion was made legal in 1973, the crime rate has declined. The implication is that crime is down because abortions are up. So, a good anti-crime package includes first killing all the babies our sociological models determine might grow up to be criminals.

That would include Jesse Jackson and a lot of other people who were born in poverty but overcame it. Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and John Donohue III, a Stanford University law professor, are responsible for the study. Are they doing for modern-day eugenicists what Margaret Sanger did for the Third ReichB declaring some categories of humans unfit to live and laying down guidelines for the master race?

In the early 1970s, as abortion laws were liberalized, some black leaders grimly suspected that whites viewed the procedure as the solution to the welfare problem. The then pro-life Jesse Jackson was quoted in the January 1977 Right to Life News as saying: "Politicians argue for abortion largely because they do not want to spend the necessary money to feed, clothe and educate more people. Here arguments for inconvenience and economic savings take precedence over arguments for human value and human life."

Jackson sounded prophetic, given the current study, when he added, "I read recently where a politician from New York was justifying abortions because they have prevented 10,000 welfare babies from being born and saved the state $15 million. In my mind, serious moral questions arise when politicians are willing to pay welfare mothers between $800 to $1,000 to have an abortion, but will not pay $30 for a hot school-lunch program to the already-born children of these same mothers."

The arguments made in the study by Levitt and Donohue were dealt with by Jackson 22 years ago: "Psychiatrists, social workers and doctors often argue for abortion on the basis that the child will grow up mentally and emotionally scarred. But who of us is complete? If incompleteness were the criteria(on) for taking life, we would all be dead. If you can justify abortion on the basis of emotional incompleteness, then your logic could also lead you to killing for other forms of incompleteness -- blindness, crippleness, old age." Or potential criminality?

Blacks have long seen themselves as targets of white power because, in many cases, they have been. Exploited by slavemasters who wanted their labor for nothing, and now by politicians who want their votes for next to nothing, blacks should be concerned about the implications of anyone linking the economic conditions of those who are poor to anti-social behavior.

Throughout our history, blacks have often been categorized as subhuman. In a 1741 New York City trial, blacks condemned to death for allegedly starting a series of fires were described as "degenerated and debased below the Dignity of Humane Species." As recalled by St. Louis University Professor William Brennan in his book, "Dehumanizing the Vulnerable," naturalist Louis Agassiz -- a leading 19 th century scientist, professor of zoology and geology at Harvard and founder of the Museum of Natural History -- gave a tremendous boost to the process of dehumanizing African-Americans: "When Agassiz first saw black people in 1846, he wrote to his mother: 'The more pity I felt at the sight of this degraded and degenerate race, the more ... impossible it becomes for me to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as we are.'"

The slave narrative of William Wells Brown (1847), notes Brennan, includes an account of how the perception of blacks as "trash" was translated into practice. A black man who had been drowned by a gang of whites was left on the shore. A trash cart picked up the man's body and tossed it in with the refuse.

What's the difference between such occurrences and what the unpublished study suggests? If blacks are trash and a disproportionate number commit crimes, then kill them early so that white folks feel safer and don't have to spend tax dollars on an "inferior" people.

This is where the abortion culture has brought us.

Cal Thomas Copyright, 1999 Los Angeles Times Syndicate.  Used with Permission.

Although the data remain unproven and speculative, they are clear on two points: The study clearly acknowledges that an unborn child is not just a mass of tissue, but a human life with potential and, most chillingly, it demonstrates that abortion is far more than a 'routine medical procedure.' It is a tool for social engineering- which is exactly as it was envisioned to be. "   Susan Martinuk, columnist - The Province, August 18, 1999

"Naturally, if you kill off a million and a half people a year, a few criminals will be in that number. So will doctors, philosophers, musicians and artists-maybe even some economists.  The findings in this study are an insult to the 40 million lives lost through abortion and an insult to the women who rightly grieve for the children they aborted...." Joseph Scheidler - Pro-Life Action League

"Whenever the elimination of certain people is heralded as a mark of progress, we should consider that an urgent cue to re-examine our society's priorities and assumption." -  Herman Goodden - London Free Press

But guess who knew this all along?

"A few years ago I theorized that the availability of abortion for a generation was the main reason for this decline [in violent crime]. My reasoning was based on knowledge that unwanted children are often neglected and abused and that this results in emotional infantile rage which is repressed but might eventually result in violence when directed outwards...I met with a great deal of skepticism when I circulated my theory to the media... My theory was recently corroborated... "   - Dr. Henry Mortgentaler

Along with several other Coalitions, Canadian Physicians for Life has joined with The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and Christian Medical Dental Society in filing application for intervention in the Latimer case before the Supreme Court of Canada. David Brown of the law firm Stikeman, Elliott has been engaged to draft grounds for appeal, as follows.

(1) The legal arguments advanced by the Appellant, Robert Latimer, in favour of the availability of a defence of necessity, the surrogate power of parents to kill their children and the existence of a constitutional exemption from the mandatory minimum sentence, if accepted, would radically alter the normative principles which underpin the protection afforded by Canadian criminal law to human life. In Rodriguez v. Attorney-General of British Columbia the late Mr. Justice Sopinka recognized the presence in Canadian society of "...the generally held and deeply rooted belief in our society that human life is sacred or inviolable" and that it has "a deep intrinsic value of its own." Embedded in the appellant's submissions is a greatly diminished view of the value of human life, a view which, if accepted as a legal norm by this Court, would turn Canadian law away from its role as a defender of human life into an instrument permitting the destruction of human lives considered unworthy of living.

(2) The murder provisions of the Criminal Code , including the minimum sentence provisions, constitute a legal framework protecting the sacredness and inviolability of human life. By contending that a defence of necessity removes his conduct from those sections and that the minimum sentence provisions of the Criminal Code constitute "cruel and unusual punishment" under section 12 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms , the Appellant squarely raises the question as to whether those provisions of the Criminal Code which protect the sanctity of human life "outrage standards of decency" of Canadian society, as per Chief Justice Lamer in R. v. Smith. In addressing that argument, this Court inevitably will be asked to decide what value Canadian law should place on certain human lives: are the existing provisions of Canadian criminal law which regarded Tracy Latimer's life as one worth living and worthy of protection from destruction constitutionally applicable in this case, or should they not apply because, in the eyes of the law, Tracy Latimer's life was not worth living and not worthy of legal protection?

(3) We will endeavour to assist the court in answering this question by bringing a moral, philosophical and social perspective, arguing that sound moral, philosophical and legal policy reasons require Canadian criminal law to continue its existing protection of the sanctity of human life, including the sanctity of life of those who are disabled.

(4) In particular, we will address what it considers to be the key normative issue framed by this appeal: is a human life characterized by disability and pain just as dignified and just as worthy of legal protection as one which is not? We submit that it is.

(5) The Appellant's legal arguments rest on the premise that any life characterized by pain is not as human or as dignified as a life without pain. From this starting point, the appellant argues that the presence of pain in Tracy Latimer's life "necessitated" her killing, excusing the appellant from any legal responsibility for her death. The appellant goes further to assert that as a parent the law provides him with a right to decide whether and when to kill his incompetent child who is in pain.

(6) We will argue that the presence of pain in a person's life does not diminish the dignity of that life or the legal protection which Canadian law should afford such a life.

(7) We will also argue that no parent has the legal right to kill his or her child whatever the circumstances. The legal obligations of a parent require the protection and preservation of a child's life; the "best interests of a child" can never include its killing.

" I just worry that if euthanasia ever became legal in this country, then people who cannot speak for themselves, people like our daughter would be at serious risk.

We've had examples of compassionate killing. The Latimer case is one. That little girl reminded us of our daughter at that age. We've gone through many of the same things, facing the same sorts of operations that our daughter's had. We accepted those requests to help make life easier for her.

We were simply pained and frightened at the outpouring of support for what that father did in this country.

It was wrong. " Anita Dadson in " Who Gets. The Last Word? New Ideas about Euthanasia "

Contributions are needed for Physicians for Life legal costs involved in this case. Donations are tax deductible. Thank you for your support.

Last week Surgeon General David Satcher, with Tipper Gore at his side, issued a "call to action" to prevent suicide." Dr. Satcher is right to identify suicide as an urgent problem. Some 31,000 Americans die each year at their own hands, and between 1952 and 1996 the number of suicides among adolescents and young adults tripled. Nearly 18 elderly Americans kill themselves on an average day.

But Dr. Satcher's campaign faces an uphill battle. The U.S. is growing increasingly pro-suicide; even many physicians and mental-health professionals openly promote suicide. The euthanasia movement extols suicide as "death with dignity." Derek Humphry's how-to book "Final Exit" became a national bestseller. Jack Kevorkian has helped kill about 130 people, but despite his murder conviction, he remains a very popular man. He was among those feted last year at Time magazine's 75th anniversary party, where actor Tom Cruise rushed up to shake his hand.

When it comes to suicide, America is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Oregon voters legalized physician-assisted suicide, but when newspapers run headlines about the state's soaring suicide rate among adolescents, nobody connects the dots. Some newspapers that have editorialized in favor of the legalization of assisted suicide also applaud Dr. Satcher's 15-point prevention plan.

Many bioethicists, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers no longer believe that mental-health professionals have a duty to prevent all suicides. Instead, they divide suicide into two categories: "rational" and "irrational." Under this theory, professionals should attempt to stop only irrational suicidesB that is, impulsive or frivolous ones. If the suicidal person seems to have a "rational" basis for self-destruction, the professional's duty to is merely to help him sort out the pros and cons.

If the suicide is then deemed rational, the mental-health professional is to do nothing to impede the patient's death. Indeed, some advocates believe that the proper response of the professional in such cases is to help the patient die.

The exact definition of rational suicide is still being worked out in the professional literature and at mental-health symposia. But a rough consensus has emerged. James L. Werth, one of the foremost proponents of the concept, has written that a decision "to suicide," as he ungrammatically puts it, should be viewed as "rational" if the patient suffers from a "hopeless condition." Mr. Werth's definition of hopeless condition "includes but is not limited to terminal illnesses, severe physical or psychological pain, mentally debilitating or deteriorating conditions, or a quality of life that is no longer acceptable to the individual."

By this definition, all suicide but the most impulsive is rational. Anyone who wants to die doesn't find his quality of life acceptable. Thus Mr. Werth implicitly calls for a program of death on demand.

What is truly alarming is that proponents of rational suicide are respected mainstream academics and clinical practitioners, professionals who treat suicidal people or teach those who do. More worrisome still, Mr. Werth recently reported that 80% of survey respondents from the American Psychological Association support his definition of rational suicide and a five-step process he created for determining whether the patient's suicide decision-making processes are "sound." An appalling 85% of respondents believed that a mental-health professional who follows Mr. Werth's published guidelines would be acting ethically.

If Dr. Satcher really wants to run an effective campaign against suicide, he is going to have to confront the euthanasia and rational-suicide movements. And he will have to face squarely the fundamental question: Will we view suicide as a terrible tragedy or, as Derek Humphry calls it, as the "ultimate civil right"? Are we a society that embraces the value of each and every one of us, or do we accept the notion that some lives aren't worth living-that some people can be "rationally" exterminated?

This commentary originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal, August 3, 1999. Reprinted with permission.

Wesley J. Smith is a lawyer for the International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force and author of "Forced Exit - The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder." His book "Culture of Death: The Destruction of Medical Ethics in America." will be out next year.

South Africa - Proposed legislation will be voted on this fall by the South African government to allow doctors to legally end the life of terminally ill patients and to give broad validity to advance directives. Voluntary active euthanasia is proposed as an option in the Bill. The Bill includes such terms (without definition) as "no meaningful existence," "intractable illness which is not terminal" and suffering "not reasonable to be endured."

California - The California Death With Dignity Act being proposed has united a broad coalition to oppose assisted suicide, bringing together advocates for the poor, medical professionals, religious denominations, disability rights activists, hospice workers, and others. According to Wesley J. Smith, "Millions of Californians do not have health insurance. For-profit HMO's make huge sums by cutting levels of care. In such a milieu, assisted suicide would victimize the most weak and vulnerable among us. Truly, the last to receive health care would be the first to receive assisted suicide."

Netherlands - Although euthanasia and assisted suicide have been widely and openly practiced in the Netherlands for years, they have remained technically illegal. Currently, doctors are assured that they will not be prosecuted if they follow certain "guidelines." The guidelines, however, are routinely ignored and it is estimated that only about 50% of euthanasia deaths are reported. Now the Dutch government is planning to formally change the law to make euthanasia legal if the guidelines are observed. According to the government proposal, published in August, children as young as 12 would be able to demand and receive euthanasia.

by: Melanie Phillips - The Sunday Times - July 25, 1999 Used with permission.

...genetic normality is surely a contradiction in terms. Who can be said to be "normal"?

The whiff of eugenics is growing stronger by the day. Nine-year-old Katie Atkinson, who has Down's syndrome, has been refused a heart-lung transplant by Leeds general infirmary because the "quality of life" of Down's patients makes them ineligible for such life-saving treatment.

Not surprisingly, her parents are outraged. They love their daughter and are appalled that she is not being given the same chance as everyone else. There are real dilemmas here, not the least of which are issues about the desirability of transplants and the ethics of donated organs.

There is also the complex judgment about the likely success of a transplant in a Down's patient. Such clinical considerations merge into a grey area of value judgments and vary from doctor to doctor. However, they have to be seen in a broader context than Down's patients.

Decisions are constantly being taken to ration scarce treatments such as these. The "points" system being developed in Scotland to downgrade candidates for heart surgery if, for example, they are unmarried, childless or unemployed-reported by this newspaper last week-merely brings into the open covert judgments that are being made case by case. Renal surgeons 15 years ago were openly admitting that patients were being turned away because they were elderly, poor, single, homeless, unintelligent or could not speak English. Forced to ration treatments because resources are finite, doctors are having to decide all the time who is more deserving.

These are invidious decisions, made necessary because of the fundamental lie the system tells the public that everyone is entitled to every treatment that is going. Now these judgments are growing even more indefensible because they are being made on the basis of a person's presumed fitness to live. Doctors are making decisions about the quality of life, which discriminate against children whose lives are deemed by medical opinion to be not worth living.

Katie is by no means alone. There is plenty of evidence that the NHS treats Down's children as second-class citizens. A report by the Down's Syndrome Association last spring documented incidents in which such children were refused all kinds of treatment on the grounds that they were "good for nothing" or were "abnormal" or an "unacceptable burden" on medical, social and educational resources. Parents were told their children did not need to see as well as others, or did not feel pain. On occasion, they were treated as if they were dead already.

These grotesque displays of prejudice completely ignore the fact that Down's parents, no less than any others, delight in their children, who bring them joy. The children are also worthy human beings in their own right. Certainly there are problems: some parents cannot cope; many Down's children have physical ailments that need attention; some will be dependent for most of their lives. To say, however, that these are reasons for not treating them is effectively to declare that there are some human beings who are not worthy of respect and dignity.

Indeed, some people go even further and appear to think that handicapped people have no place in the world at all. The test-tube baby pioneer Professor Robert Edwards said earlier this month that parents had a moral responsibility not to produce genetically defective children. It would soon be "a sin," he said, for parents to produce a child suffering from a genetic disease. This was a remarkable moral inversion that turned eugenic arguments, which should be seen as a blot on our humanity, into a social good and made a sinner of anyone who did not practise them. Apart from a lamentable moral deficiency, this also displayed a distinct lack of scientific imagination, since genetic normality is surely a contradiction in terms. Who can be said to be "normal"? We are each of us, after all, unique.

Edwards's remarks were singularly misjudged. Yet the attitude he reflected is widespread. Pregnant women are made to feel abnormal or plain immoral if they refuse amniocentesis tests to detect Down's in their unborn babies. The underlying assumption is that there are standards by which some lives can be judged to be worthless and that science makes a better judge than an emotional mother...

Doctors who make quality-of-life decisions over treatment, or who argue for genetic screening, are often motivated simply by compassion to prevent suffering. They observe in their clinics the agonies of patients and their families and seek as a result to prevent such grief and distress from happening in the first place. However, such a commendable attitude shades quickly into arrogance, a lack of humility in the face of human resilience and tenacity. There is also a shocking refusal to accept that gravely disabled people can experience happiness or bring it to others.

The reason why this is such a big problem is that quality-of-life judgments are made by highly educated people and the push for eugenics has always come from the intellectual elites. The more high-powered the individual, the more there seems to be a recoil from any evidence of "abnormality." Disproportionate numbers of judges, doctors, moral philosophers and academics seem to find it more difficult than less elevated mortals to accept that an imperfect life is worth living. .it is such individuals who are making these life-and-death decisions on the wards and in the courts.

Medical and ethical thinking is in a dangerous mess. If this medical mindset predominated, the world would never have known the full genius of Stephen Hawking or Christy Brown; not to mention Milton (blind) or Beethoven (deaf). Is there really any contest?

Lest we weary of pursuing these things -

From Paul Johnson's book: "The Offshore Islanders - A History of the English People" Phoenix Paperback, 1992 (revised) p.285-6

"I find Paul Johnson unable to write a dull sentence. His 'Modern Times' is opinionated but panoramic, another great read." - Will Johnston

The story of the infant chimney-sweeps, or the "climbing boys" as they were known, is a terrifying example of the massive resistance which English society presents to the reform of even the most spectacular and indefensible abuses. These boys formed a small group, perhaps never more than 10,000, but they were typical of many forgotten and brutalised classes, too weak to organise themselves, and therefore wholly dependent on philanthropic champions.

They were recruited from workhouses, from the age of four up, and strictly bound as apprentices by the Poor Law Guardians; they could be imprisoned, and flogged if they broke their articles by escaping. They not only swept the chimneys but were used to put out fires; often they were forced up by the use of long pricks and by applying wisps of flaming straw to their feet. They suffered from a variety of occupational diseases and many died from suffocation.

What made the injustices from which they suffered more repellent was that the "political nation" knew all about them: they were not tucked away in some obscure corner of the coal-fields or the London slums but were regularly and visibly employed in the homes of the upper and middle classes.

Everyone knew that tiny children (including a few girls) swept their chimneys. Indeed, the resistance to reform sprang from the unwillingness of the possessing classes to rebuild their chimneys or to pay the higher firerisk premiums which the insurance companies (who organised the opposition to reform in Parliament) claimed must follow if children were banned. Nor could anyone claim ignorance of the worst aspects of the system.

As far back as 1760 two Sunday school teachers set up an agitation on the boys' behalf; and in 1785 one of them, Jonas Hanway, published a detailed account of the horrors in his Sentimental History of Chimney Sweepers in London and Westminster. In 1788 an act was passed forbidding the employment of children under eight; it was totally ineffective. In 1804, 1807, 1808 and 1809, new bills were thrown out. In 1817 a Select Committee investigated, and published, a catalogue of sickening horrors - reinforced by a brilliant article by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review -- but a bill based on its findings was thrown out by the Lords. In 1834 a new bill was actually passed, limiting the age to ten, forbidding master-sweeps to send children up chimneys which were on fire, and stipulating that all future flues should be a minimum size of 14 inches by 9; but it was universally evaded and became nugatory.

In 1840, aided by a passionate re-former from the Hand-in-Hand Insurance Office, Thomas Steven, Shaftesbury succeeded in carrying through yet another bill against resistance that can only be called fanatical. Despite his efforts to bring test cases, it proved impossible to secure convictions in the courts. In 1851 he got another bill through the Lords, but it lapsed in the Commons for want of support. In 1853 he produced a third bill; but it was referred to a Select Committee, which reported that it was "inexpedient to proceed further." He got a fourth bill through the Lords in 1854, but it was voted down in the Commons. In 1855 he could not even get it read a second time in the Lords. In 1861 he got the sweeps referred to the Children's Employment Commission, and in consequence he persuaded Parliament to pass an act raising the age of employment to 16. This was in 1864; but two years later the Commission reported that the act was a failure. The fault lay not in the drafting, but in the general conspiracy of local authorities, magistrates, police, judges, juries and the public to frustrate the law. Boys continued to die as a result of glaring breaches of the act; Shaftesbury noted two cases in 1872, and in 1873 he referred to the Lords the coroner's inquest on a boy aged seven who suffocated in a flue.

In 1875, following the death of a boy aged 14, Shaftesbury at last secured a conviction for manslaughter against a master sweep. The sentence was only six months, but the case caught the eye of The Times , and in the ensuing agitation Shaftesbury finally carried a draconian bill through what he called a "very inattentive" Parliament.

It had taken precisely 102 years to secure this elementary act of justice to defenseless children.