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On alleged police brutality, and the need for investigation

My post last night may have seemed rather unsympathetic to those who took to the streets in protest against education cuts. And, indeed, I maintain that occupying a university library and pushing students' work off desks is a rather juvenile and foolish thing to do.

But there is another side of the story, too. And in the aftermath of yesterday's protests in London, there are several as-yet-unconfirmed reports of several instances of police violence and abusive behaviour, some directed against protestors as young as fourteen or fifteen. Demonstrators were, reportedly, "kettled" - forced into a limited area and kept there by police cordons for hours at a time, in cold weather. In a press release today, the Education Activist Network is claiming that police "charged protestors on horseback". The BBC reports one eye-witness account from a teenager:

Arkady Rose, from London, is mother of 15-year-old Kathy, who was kettled in Wednesday's protests. She said she was proud of her daughter's participation in the protest.
She added: "After all, it's her life and education that's going to be affected by the changes.
"Kathy wasn't released until after 8pm and she says that there were still students younger than her in there, despite the police saying there weren't. She says she saw teenagers of her age being beaten with batons and people who were asking to leave for medical treatment being refused.
"It seems like the kettling started around the time that most students had had enough and were wanting to go home. The police seem to have kept them moving around by changing the story and moving them from exit to exit with the intention of tiring them out.

"There was no food or water, despite what they say. All my daughter managed to eat all day was a bag of Minstrels."

The Guardian repeats the allegation that mounted police charged protestors, citing an email received from a protestor named "Dylan" who claims to have been at Downing Street yesterday evening.

Police in riot helmets were gradually pushing us back on foot, but when that proved ineffectual, they brought forward a line of horses. Assuming the horses were just there for show, we continued protesting. Then the horses charged. This sounds like a complete exaggeration but there's no other word for it. The horses charged forward at a canter, through the crowd. I pulled my friend out of the way just in time, but I saw a girl, around sixteen or seventeen, get trampled. I didn't see her get up. Another man was trampled and immediately helped up by other protesters.

Earlier I had also noticed an incident in which a police officer was clearly out of control. A girl at the front of the crowd, nearest the police, was yelling, "Peaceful protest, peaceful protest!". He screamed "FUCK OFF!" and punched her in the face. It's interesting how, despite the presence of reporters at the scene, none of this has been in the news. 

We can't, of course, yet confirm the truth or falsehood of any of these allegations. The police, like everyone else, are entitled to be presumed innocent until guilt is proven, and I'm naturally wary of relying on hearsay when such serious accusations are involved.

But these allegations of abuse are serious enough to merit an immediate inquiry. Any violent interference with a peaceful protest needs to be investigated, immediately, by an independent civilian body. It may be that the police will be cleared of wrongdoing, and we should not, of course, pre-judge the issue; but we are entitled to know the truth, and I think we are justified in calling on Parliament to demand an inquiry. 

You know Christmas is coming...

... when certain right-wing bloviators start to serve up the traditional seasonal mulled whine, and the next battle in the War on Christmas™ begins. After all, we need to be reminded that we heathen unbelieving Grinches are steadily destroying the True Meaning of Christmas™ with our every thought, word and deed. Because every time you wish someone "Season's Greetings", God kills a reindeer.

Cuttlefish, the Poet Laureate of the eeeebil godless blogosphere, rallies the troops with a stirring verse or two here.

On a vaguely related note, Roy Zimmerman has promised that "Christmas on Mars" will return to YouTube this weekend. Something for my fellow benighted heathens to look forward to.

Political activism. You're doing it wrong.

It's being reported that student anti-cuts protestors in Oxford occupied the Radcliffe Camera today.

The Camera is, of course, part of the Bodleian Library, and, in Full Term, is likely to be full of worried-looking finalists working on essays. I wasn't there, and did not witness today's events, but there are reports of protestors "dancing on tables" and "throwing students' work off desks". Perhaps I'm missing something, but I would venture to suggest that this, if true, probably isn't a terribly sensible way to win support for one's cause. (Nor, indeed, to demonstrate one's commitment to the social value of education.)

There are, of course, plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize the government's proposals. The cuts to arts, humanities and social science research funding, in particular, risk permanent harm to the intellectual and cultural life of our country. And in a democratic society, the freedom to assemble and protest peacefully, whatever the cause, is an immensely important one.

But this kind of puerile, destructive idiocy isn't really helping anyone. And these particular zealots are doing their own movement a serious disservice: because adolescents dancing on library tables will, with tomorrow morning's front pages and TV reports, quickly become the iconic image of today's protests. After the London demonstrations, the image that filled the public consciousness wasn't a picture of thousands of non-violent students assembling in the streets to express grievances. It was a scene of broken windows and projectile fire-extinguishers at Millbank. Shock sells newspapers: and in an age of visual media, such things tend to be indelible. It doesn't do the anti-cuts cause any favours. It simply gives ammunition to those who would prefer to depict all radical students (grossly unfairly) as out-of-control adolescent vandals.

I'm not denying that, on occasion, there are legitimate justifications for radical action and lawbreaking. But this is not one of them. And even if it were, it's rather hard to see why a university library would be deemed a suitable target. Whatever you think about government policy, the harried undergraduates trying to work in the Rad Cam are certainly not to blame for it, and they do not deserve to suffer.

(Postscript) For your daily dose of ridiculously inflated hyperbole: a lecturer in pharmacology proclaims grandly that the anti-cuts protestors "stand in the proud tradition of the suffragettes and the civil rights movement". Seriously.

Torture doesn't work: or, why James Delingpole is a morally bankrupt moron

I would hope my readers agree that torture is, in all circumstances, a moral atrocity. For as long as we wish to claim to be a free society, we should never descend to the level of authoritarian regimes by legitimizing torture, by whatever name. Speaking for myself, despite the Daily Mail's best efforts at scaremongering, I'm considerably less worried about the danger of dying in a terrorist attack (an eventuality far less probable than my dying in, say, a car accident) than about the serious moral evil of entrusting our government with the power to abuse and brutalize those in its custody. The appalling evidence of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay - including the indefinite imprisonment and torture of the demonstrably innocent - ought to illustrate, even to the most illiberal reader, the perils of trusting the state with unlimited power for our "protection".

Unfortunately, the odious James Delingpole, writing in the Telegraph, jumped recently on a classic authoritarian bandwagon - invoking the old "ticking time-bomb" canard, and accusing his straw-liberal of elevating the wellbeing of "murderous al-Qaeda terrorists" over the lives of the innocent.

Even if one descends to Delingpole's level of moral bankruptcy, however, it's also clear that, if one's goal is to obtain accurate information, torture doesn't work. From time immemorial, authoritarian regimes have tortured people: and in the process, they have discovered that torture is a very effective means of extracting false confessions, but a very ineffective means of extracting truth. People being tortured typically say whatever their torturers want to hear, in the hope of getting them to stop. Hence why evidence obtained under torture is rightly regarded, in the courtroom and elsewhere, as inherently unreliable.

Which brings me to the point of this post: Brian Michael Jenkins, an intelligence and counter-terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation - hardly an organization renowned for its liberal pacifistic inclinations - also opines in the LA Times that torture doesn't work. (via Ed Brayton)

I don't think torture belongs in the American arsenal. I think torture is illegal, is immoral, but I would go further and argue that it doesn't work.


These silly scenarios [in which] the terrorist knows where the bomb is that's about to go off in 30 minutes -- that's not reality. Further, you have to judge what you get in information versus the strategic loss that you take when it is revealed, as it will be inevitably, that a country is employing torture.


In Madrid, [I chaired] a working group on intelligence at the time of the revelations of the abuses in Iraq. I was being pummeled by men who are not squeamish, not hand-wringing compassionate folks, [who said] it was worse than immoral -- it was stupid. The information really had very little value, and yet the loss that we took strategically to our reputation is tremendous. This is like going to Las Vegas and throwing down a million dollars to win a nickel.


Finally, you take into account that [using torture] changes the nature of our own society, and that is a tremendous cost.


[As for legal justifications], I would find a legal brief more compelling if I knew the lawyer had witnessed an actual waterboarding -- more so, had the author been waterboarded. Let's waterboard a panel of lawyers and see where they come out.

Delingpole is welcome to assert that he knows more than Jenkins about what works, and what doesn't, in interrogations. I know who I'm more inclined to believe.

An update on the protests, and why we shouldn't trust the police

As mentioned in my last post, today is the NUS's designated "National Day of Action against [higher education] Fees and Cuts." True to form, this morning I encountered a marching column of protestors in central Oxford on the corner of Turl and High Streets, many holding Socialist Worker Party signs, chanting "Fuck fees! Fuck fees! Education should be free!"

I've already written extensively about the cuts themselves, but a couple of things caught my eye. Firstly, I spotted a young policewoman surreptitiously filming the proceedings on a small video camera. As the press has already reported, it is routine police practice in the UK, relying on the reams of enabling legislation enacted by the previous Labour government, to retain videos of protestors in police intelligence databases. If you have participated in a high-profile political protest, they probably have a file on you, whether or not you were ever charged with a crime.

This disturbing McCarthyish practice is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. As in most countries, British police regularly arrest peaceful protestors and later release them without charge, as a means of intimidation. But under one of the last Labour government's more Orwellian schemes, DNA samples are taken - by force, if need be - from everyone who is arrested, and retained on the 5.1-million-strong central DNA database for ever. This practice has already been ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights, but, as with so many ECHR decisions, Parliament has thus far taken no action to bring British law into line with our international commitments.

Whether or not one agrees that "education should be free" - and I certainly do not - the right to peaceful protest, whatever one's views, is a cornerstone of freedom. And if police are given an inch of power to regulate protests, they will take a mile. It's time to start standing up to the police, demanding the repeal of the innumerable authoritarian enabling-measures enacted by governments of both parties in the last twenty years, and refusing to comply passively with illiberal practices. And regardless of your opinions of the substantive merits of this protest, all of us should stand in solidarity today with the victims of abuses of police power.


As an unrelated addendum, I was also deeply disheartened to see so many SWP protestors proudly holding aloft signs bearing pictures like "Bad romance" and "Leave him, he'll hurt you in the end" alongside photoshopped images of David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Outside primary school, "HAHA UR GAY!!!" is neither a funny insult nor a clever one. And homophobic "jokes" do not become any more enlightened merely because they come from the left.

Action against fees and cuts?

Apparently, today has been chosen by the NUS and other activist groups as the "National Day of Action against Fees and Cuts", protesting both the planned rise in undergraduate tuition fees (from £3,000 to £9,000 a year) and the cutbacks in education and research funding.

For reasons I already explained, I'm vehemently opposed to the cuts in research funding - which will, inter alia, virtually eliminate public funding for arts, social sciences and humanities research, something which is a very bad idea for our society. And I don't like the government's proposals, by any means. It's also fair enough to point out that Liberal Democrat MPs have broken their express pledges to vote against any rise in tuition fees, which does not speak well of their honesty.

Nonetheless, I remain undecided about the rise in tuition costs. It should be borne in mind that Britain's generous student loan system gives British undergraduates an interest-free loan to cover their fees - which is not repayable until you're earning a salary, and is deducted automatically thereafter from your salary with the amount of repayment linked to your income. It amounts, in effect, to an extra payroll tax paid by employed graduates. In other words, it's hard to see how this proposal is particularly different from the "graduate tax" proposed by the left. It doesn't seem that it will require students to find more money up-front, so it shouldn't prevent young people from low-income households from going to university. And it's beyond doubt that something needed to be done: the status quo in higher education could not have been sustained for very much longer. With more than 40 percent of young people going to university (which I believe to be a very good thing for our society), it has to be funded somehow. These proposals aren't great, but I don't see that they are as bad as they appear at first blush.

So, despite sincere sympathy with the protestors, I won't be demonstrating today. I don't really think "You say: cut back! We say: fight back against *some* aspects of the cuts, particularly the planned elimination of arts and humanities funding, while being somewhat more ambivalent about undergraduate tuition fee rises, and acknowledging that the status quo in education funding is financially unsustainable and requires reform!" would fit on a sign.

(Addendum: This government, like the last, is doing plenty of other things which are certainly more iniquitous than education cuts - our country's barbaric treatment of asylum-seekers, for a start, and slashing housing benefit for the poor. I'm certainly not intending to praise Cameron and Clegg. But it is perhaps disheartening that education cuts get so much more political attention, and provoke so much more popular outrage, than do the British state's ongoing abuses against the genuinely poor and marginalized.)

An immigration policy that could have been developed by the Underpants Gnomes

In brief: our Home Secretary, Theresa May, has announced that skilled migration to the UK from outside the European Economic Area will be capped at 21,700 for next year, a cut of 6,300 from last year.

The Daily Mail will, no doubt, be relieved that the government is protecting our shores from the threat posed by foreign-born scientists, academics and skilled professionals. After all, in the strange and frightening parallel world that the Mail editorial team inhabits, this sceptred isle was in imminent danger of being flooded by a horde of eeeebil scary foreign marine biologists, oncologists and art historians until May and her fellow armchair border-warriors bravely stepped up to the mark.

However, in the world in which the rest of us live, it's hard to see how anyone could rationally defend this policy for more than five seconds. The Confederation of British Industry doesn't want it. Universities don't want it. Even the unions don't want it. Among the (small) proportion of the voting population who actually know what this policy entails, I have not yet encountered one person who thinks it's a good idea. There simply doesn't seem to be any logic behind it.

It won't make any difference to overcrowding, since the bulk of economic migration to Britain comes from within the EEA and is therefore unaffected by the policy.  And it will deprive Britain of skilled professionals who would have made a contribution to economic, intellectual and cultural life. Even if one supports immigration restrictions in general (which I do not), I can't follow the logic of the government's proposals. Neither, it seems, can anyone else with a stake in the matter.

Perhaps the government is hoping that Mail readers will see the words "immigration cap" and start cheering, their xenophobic bloodlust having been sated, without bothering to read any further. Sadly, I fear they might be right.

On homelessness in winter

I've commented a few times on the serious problem of homelessness in British cities. If you have ever been in Oxford or London in winter, you will, without a doubt, have noticed the sheer numbers of street-dwellers, huddled forlornly in blankets on pavements and in porchways, asking you for spare change.

It is nothing short of a tragedy that, in a country which is neither especially poor nor renowned for its hospitable climate, we cannot house all of our citizens in winter. And we are all morally responsible for doing something about this.

Unfortunately, we should also bear in mind the unhappy fact that the Salvation Army, one of the largest providers of charitable services to the homeless on both sides of the Atlantic, is a conservative evangelical Christian organization with explicit anti-gay beliefs, and a history of lobbying against gay rights laws that protect employees from discrimination. I don't doubt that the Salvation Army has done, and is doing, much commendable work: but as a member of the LGBT community, and a close friend to many others, I can't, in good conscience, advocate donating to a group which explicitly holds us, our identities and our relationships in contempt.

Instead, for those so inclined, I would urge you to donate to a secular local homelessness charity this winter. I realize that most people reading this are penniless students (and I also realize that my readers are not terribly numerous), but even a small donation may make a difference. For UK readers, Shelter is a charity which provides aid, advice and support to those who are homeless or facing eviction.


(As an addendum, I should add that I am not, of course, seeking to direct attention away from other worthy causes: Oxfam and other development charities urgently need your help too, and I certainly do not subscribe to the tribalist view that we should prioritize the needs of those on our doorstep over the rest of the world. But we should seek to do good where we can: and, for those of us who come face-to-face with the suffering of the homeless in Oxford every time we go outdoors, I would suggest that human empathy, if nothing else, compels us to do something about it.)

In the spirit of free inquiry

Most of my readers will doubtless be rather fed up of reading opinions of various stripes about the government's proposals to triple undergraduate tuition fees, a subject which has already been more-than-adequately discussed throughout the British blogosphere. It is not my intention to express an opinion on that subject today.

Rather, I would like to address a much more troubling facet of the government's higher education cuts, and one which has received far less media attention. I am, of course, talking about the proposed cuts to public funding of research. Specifically, research in the arts, social sciences and humanities is to lose almost all of its public funding. Natural science and medical research will survive, but in a severely reduced form. 

Ben Goldacre has already explained why the funding of scientific research matters. But it falls to me to point out, in the face of apparent apathy, why funding for the arts and humanities matters too.

If arts and humanities researchers are deprived of public support and must beg for funds from corporations and private donors, there will, of course, be far too little to go around. Charitable foundations do not have even a fraction of the resources necessary to support the bulk of British research. And corporations - being, rightly, concerned to make a profit for their shareholders - will fund research only when it is, in some sense, profitable for them. Of course, the private sector might fund plenty of research in science, technology, marketing and advertising, and the like: the more farsighted companies might even fund "blue sky" research without the prospect of an immediate payoff. (Like Google's famous "20 percent policy", which encourages Google engineers to devote 20 percent of their working time to projects of their own choosing.) In no way am I attacking corporations, nor am I denying the value and power of free-market innovation.

But it's hard to see why any rational media corporation, for instance, would want to pay for, say, a sociological study into the portrayals of race and gender in children's television. (Not least, because the results, when published, are more likely to make the corporation look bad than good.) Or why any corporation would see fit to fund an archaeological project on the remains of thirteenth-century Byzantium, or an ethnographic study on the lives of the rural poor in Tanzania. There is no profit to be earned from such endeavours, however far down the line. And they could not be made profitable without corrupting their purpose, and transforming them into corporate PR rather than honest academic inquiry.

Some of my readers might therefore ask why the taxpayer should be funding research endeavours that are, by their own admission, unprofitable and commercially unviable. My answer: because a university is not just about maximising economic growth. It is not just a training ground for "future leaders", a proprietary laboratory for our industries, or a means of attracting investment from the wealthy. Rather, it is about improving the human condition. And in a democracy, free inquiry in the social, political and cultural spheres is no less important to the human condition than free inquiry in the scientific and technological spheres. We cannot improve our society unless we first understand it: and the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences are the best intellectual tools at our disposal for doing so.

British higher education is, increasingly, about money. Desperate for funds to cover its financial gap, Oxford's first priority at the moment is to attract investment from the rich. Aside from begging its alumni for donations, Oxford is also building a successful business model. The state-of-the-art plate-glass Said Business School, endowed by a Saudi arms dealer, charges aspiring members of the global elite some £44,200 for a one-year MBA. And Oxford is building on its successes by opening the new Blavatnik School of Government, funded by a generous donation from fabulously wealthy Russian tycoon Leonard Blavatnik, aping Harvard's Kennedy School in the hope of becoming a premier training centre for "future world leaders". Meanwhile, research funding is being cut. The direction seems clear: it's all about attracting the attention of the world's elite, and giving them the prestige of the Oxford name in exchange for a hefty fee, and, with luck, large alumni donations further down the line. 

In other words, it's all about money. The spirit of free inquiry in our universities, such as it is, gives way to the pursuit of wealth. And, to paraphrase the King James Version... no man can serve two masters; ye cannot serve both knowledge and Mammon. If we commercialize research in the arts and humanities, we will confuse its purpose, and lose the critical independence that makes such research worthwhile.

But perhaps this is inevitable, and we are struggling against the tide.

Refugee rights, and the ones who walk away from Omelas

Today on Facebook, the Student Action for Refugees community page informed me of the ongoing case of Rabar Hamad, a young asylum-seeker from Iraq who fled to the UK after his parents were murdered in a bomb attack. Hamad, who claims to be a teenager, is facing deportation to his home country after Wigan Council social workers decided (on what basis, we are not informed) that he had been untruthful about his age. In August, he fled custody to avoid deportation, eliciting a predictable foaming-at-the-mouth rant from the Daily Mail.

We can't, of course, know with any certainty if the young man in question is, in truth, sixteen or twenty. But, either way, I see no rational justification for returning him by force to war-torn Iraq. And - in light of the tragic and as-yet-uninvestigated death of Jimy Mubenga, an Angolan refugee who died in the custody of private security contractors while being forcibly deported from the UK - I would venture to suggest that we should all take a look at what our own government is doing, in our names, to the vulnerable and powerless. 

The way that asylum-seekers are treated in this country is nothing short of appalling. Large numbers of asylum-seekers are detained in asylum "detention centres" like Oxford's Campsfield House, in worse conditions than prisoners, for years at a time while their claims are being processed. Children are detained, too, at the notorious Yarl's Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire, scene of a hunger strike earlier this year in which some 70 women, many victims of torture and rape in their home countries, protested against "unfair and degrading" treatment and against their forcible separation from their children.

... the women's testimonies are strikingly similar and they stand by their accounts. Most were locked in an airless corridor for up to eight hours, without access to food, water, toilet facilities or medical care. Four others – accused of being "ringleaders" – were locked up in separate rooms. Many women collapsed, two were left vomiting and two were injured after guards with riot shields tried to stop them from escaping out of the window into a yard, they claim. Some were racially abused, they say.

The coalition government has promised to cease the detention of children, but the rest of Yarl's Wood will remain open for business - and it is a business, being run for profit (like most of Britain's detention facilities) by a private security contractor named Serco. The whole arrangement seems eerily reminiscent of the Victorian workhouse, herding the voiceless and marginalized into institutions out of public sight, in the custody of warders motivated by financial gain.

And, of course, for those asylum-seekers who are unable to satisfy the authorities that their claims are meritorious, their fate will be deportation back to a war-torn country - if they don't die en route in the custody of security contractors, as Jimy Mubenga did. Considering that refugees typically speak little English and are unlikely to be especially familiar with our legal system, the immigration tribunal process is somewhat daunting - and the forthcoming cuts to legal aid aren't really going to help with that.

Why do we do this, exactly? It doesn't serve any rational social objective. Asylum-seekers are a tiny fraction of the total number of migrants to this country. They are, by and large, vulnerable and powerless people with nowhere else to go. Despite what the Daily Mail would have you believe, they aren't "taking your jobs", either: even if not detained, they are not allowed to work while their claims are being processed. It's rather hard to see against what danger the forbidding fences of Yarl's Wood, and the army of private security workers employed at taxpayer's expense, are protecting us.

Rather, the way we treat asylum-seekers in this country can only be explained by the willingness of this government, and the last, to pander to the mindless xenophobia promoted by the popular press. Refugees are an easy target - a powerless, voiceless, disenfranchised, deeply unpopular minority. Successive armchair-warrior Home Secretaries can gain easy political capital by macho posturing on "border security". For a politician, there is, after all, nothing to lose: asylum-seekers themselves can't vote, and most of the voting public are either unaware of, or indifferent to, their suffering. Those few of us Ivory-Tower PC Liberals™ who actually care about such matters are vastly, vastly outnumbered by the horde of angry Mail readers, who applaud the idea of putting torture victims and their children behind bars. Britain for the British, they say. After all, we live in a world where one's human rights seem to be largely dependent on the accident of where one is born.

Our society is, in so many ways, deeply twisted. I'll leave you with an excerpt from Ursula Le Guin's short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. Ponder, perhaps, whether we are so very much better.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.
The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good, " it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer...
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.