Abstract
In June 1894 Sir Thomas Scanlen, member of Parliament for Cradock and former prime minister of the Cape, gave evidence to the committee on the Destitute Children Relief Bill. When asked by the chairman if he thought it ‘a very hard case for a poor European if his child were forcibly taken away from him to a school for three years, and afterwards indentured, perhaps to a stranger, up to its twenty-first year’, he responded:
There you have to consider and come to a determination between what you call a hardship to the parent and the interests of society. I take it it is not in the interests of society that any children should grow up uneducated, and probably swell the criminal classes. … When a parent neglects that duty I think the State is quite justified in stepping in, and that the inconvenience, or supposed inconvenience, to the parent ought not to stand in the way of the interests of the State and the interests of the child.1
Although Scanlen’s views were more strident than most of the other witnesses called by the committee,2 his point that the interests of the Cape’s white children intersected with those of the colonial state was shared by nearly all of the committee members and the individuals who gave evidence before them.
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Notes
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Duff, S.E. (2015). Saving the Child to Save the Nation: Poverty, Whiteness, and the Destitute Children Relief Act. In: Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380944_6
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