They Were But Children: The Immigration of British Home Children to Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay draws attention to a little-known era in Canadian history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which nearly 100,000 British children came to this country as child labourers. Research indicates that there was political and social support in both countries, especially at the outset, for poor and/or homeless British children to be sent to live with and work for Canadian families. As a result, several benevolent societies and religious organizations developed and carried out child migration schemes, bringing children to Canada to be trained as domestic servants or farm labourers. Controversy, doubts and suspicions eventually grew around the organizations and also extended to the children, many of whom came to be looked upon as having criminal tendencies, low intellect, low moral standards, and/or being without feelings. Recent research carried out with some Home Children, as they were called, points out the devastating effects such views had on the children. Feelings of shame, unworthiness, and inferiority persisted throughout their childhoods and adult lives. Key Words: benevolent societies, British Poor Law, child labour, child migration to Canada, Home Children, Thomas Barnardo
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".