ITALIAN VAGRANT CHILDREN.

Little Giovanni Alessandro Bosco, the bright-eyed Italian boy who has a couple of white mice to attract the attention of passers-by, or believes that kind folks will perchance give a copper for hearing a tune played on a small barrel-organ, is not perhaps aware that he has risen to the dignity of being officially noticed. In other words, Italian organ-boys, image-boys, street exhibitors, and appellants to a compassionate public, have been the subject of correspondence between the diplomatists of Italy and those of England. The despatches or communications have lately been published in a blue-book or parliamentary paper; shewing that European governments are now alive to sympathies which would have had but little chance of manifesting their presence in an earlier and ruder state of society.

About three years and a half ago, we gave an account of what had come under our knowledge in Italy concerning the deportation of Italian boys as beggars or exhibitors. We stated that 'Much to its credit, the parliament of Italy have before them a bill to abolish the system of apprenticing children of less than eighteen years of age to strolling trades or professions, such as mountebanks, jugglers, charlatans, rope-dancers, fortune-tellers, expounders of dreams, itinerant musicians, vocalists or instrumentalists, exhibitors of animals, and mendicants of every description, at home or abroad, under a penalty of two pounds to ten pounds for each offence, and from one to three months' imprisonment. It is to be trusted that this will shortly become law, and so put an end to one of the most crying evils of our time.' Subsequent facts shew that, although this law has passed in Italy, and may in that country be producing some good results, it has not in any way lessened the number of vagrant Italian children seen in the streets of London and other English towns. How it happens that the remedial measure has not relieved our shores from this incubus, we will explain presently; but it may be well first to summarise a few of the statements in the former article, sufficient to shew the mode in which this cruel traffic is carried on.

In years gone by, when Italy was split up into a number of kingdoms, dukedoms, and petty states, very little attention was paid to the general welfare of the people; the peasants and small cultivators were often so hardly driven that the support of a family became a serious responsibility; and a people, naturally kind rather than the reverse, were tempted to the adoption of a course from which their better feeling would have revolted. They did not actually sell their children, but they apprenticed them off for a time, on the receipt of a sum of money. The padroni or masters, to whom the children were apprenticed, were men whose only sympathy was for themselves and their own pockets; they made specious promises, and got the poor young creatures, eight years old or so, into their hands. Too often, the parents never saw the children again, and remained quite ignorant of their fate. It was not in Italy that the scoundrels kept their victims; they mostly crossed the Alps into France, whence many of them found their way to England. Or else they were shipped at Genoa, and conveyed at cheap rates to such shores as seemed likely to be most profitable to the padroni. As these men acquire an accurate knowledge of the extent to which sheer open beggary is illegal in this or that country, they adopt a blind, by turning the poor children into exhibitors of white mice, marmots, or monkeys. Advanced a little in age and experience, the boys are intrusted with small organs, and perhaps later with organs of larger size. Those whose strength of constitution enables them to bear a life of hardship during the so-called apprenticeship can sometimes obtain an organ on hire from one of the makers of those instruments, and become itinerant organ-grinders on their own account. But there is