Protection of Children Paramount

And I dare lay down another fundamental proposition on this topic. There are some duties that the state may neglect; there are some duties that the state may postpone, but a state may not neglect, may not postpone, its interest in protecting and developing the childhood of that state.

We are not so much concerned as we sometimes think we are as to our navies or our armies. It is a good thing to have a navy, especially if you happen to get into war, but we get up a great deal of unnecessary sentiment on these matters. For the past few weeks we have discussed the proper armor line of the great battleships, and yet every one of those battleships will probably be put on the junk-heaps without having an opportunity to settle that question by experiment. We develop a great amount of spectacular excitement over some question that is remote, as what will become of the Philippine Islands fifty or one hundred years from now, but we are disposed criminally to neglect the questions that lie immediately at our doors. That is why we see childhood, the childhood of America, sacrificed while we are debating over some abstract proposition. The state has no higher duty than the duty to care for its children; to protect them, educate them, provide means for their development; and that is the only issue where failure on the part of the state is absolute and without remedy. There is no salvation anywhere else. States may have divergent views about the tariff. One state may be for free trade and another for protection, and both may alike prosper. One state may be a military state, and another a peaceable state, and both be alike prosperous. They may have conflicting ideas on a great many propositions, but on this one proposition there. is no room for division, no room for argument. The state that does not look after the children of the state is inviting its own destruction.

Individual Responsibility

The last proposition I lay down is this: that what is the duty of the state, what is the duty of society, becomes the duty and responsibility and privilege of the individual, not to be shirked by putting it off on some abstract organization that we call society or that we call the church or that we call the state. The funda

mental difficulty of this whole proposition has been the lack of public interest in it. Why is it that we cannot have proper laws on this question of child labor? Is it because our students of economics are too ignorant to make suggestions to us? Not at all. Wise suggestions have been made over and over again. We know what a good child labor law is. Is it because our manufacturers so control things that we cannot have legislation? On the contrary, many of them are willing to enter into the support of reasonable legislation, and those that are not willing constitute but a small minority in society, and have no power of controlling the legislation of the state. The reason we have not a better condition of things in this country is that the Christian men and women of Atlanta and Nashville and New Orleans and every Southern city, and every city in this country, do not care for these things and are indifferent as to their children. This state of things will not be remedied except under the compelling law of human interest, and when we want these things we shall have them. My proposition, therefore, is that it is your duty and my duty to busy ourselves with the ethical concern of the state. It is somebody's business to take an interest in these things; it is somebody's business to say to capital, "You may mortgage the streets of our cities; you may bond our railroads; you may syndicate the water that we drink; you may lay hands on the very air that we breathe, but you shall not mortgage the childhood of this generation; you shall not blight in earliest bud the manhood and womanhood of the next generation."

We want the church to be busy about this matter. It will be a better thing for the churches to do than running the Wednesday night prayer meeting. We want the state to be busy about this. It will be a great deal better for the state to do this than to be holding some great political convention where the only serious proposition is whether one man shall go out and another man shall go in. We want the state to build its school houses, to build them all over the land, and to put the flag of our country above them, and we want the churches to build chapels and Sunday-school rooms and ring out the chimes from every steeple, and we want both state and church to cry out with the cry of that Master of men and lover of children, "Suffer the little children to come unto Me and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."

THE DUTY OF THE PEOPLE IN CHILD PROTECTION

BY HON. HOKE SMITH,
Governor of Georgia.

Our chairman has referred to Socrates and Croesus, and in a manner to cause us to admire the one and to be careless of the other. I have no doubt that even during their lives Socrates enjoyed privileges and experienced forms of pleasure that were shut out to the cold and selfish career simply of money. If we are to serve our God, our country and our fellowman, if that is our highest duty, how can we find anywhere the union of all three of these services so completely blended as when we seek to train our children and the children of our country mentally, physically, morally and spiritually?

When Solomon told us that we must train up a child as he should go and afterward he would not depart from the way, it was a solemn admonition; it was broad language which he used. It contemplated that when we care for the child, we must look after the physical child as well as the mental child; we must look after the moral child as well as the spiritual child. We have our school houses, especially devoted to training them in books; we have our Sunday schools, especially devoted to training them in the Bible. If we take off either of these lines of instruction, their work will be defective. You cannot lead a man to the true conception of spiritual truths, or to any faith in you as a spiritual leader, if you are content to see the man's mother in want and his wife and children hungry and naked. The work of the pulpit cannot accomplish its highest end, it cannot produce its richest fruit, if it is to be limited to that to which I have just referred, modern evangelization. It must be broadened into a conception of life of the present as well as of the future, of the things that surround man here on earth; and the pulpit must teach, as to the child, not simply the spiritual state, it must also consider the responsibility of adults for the mental, physical and moral side of the child as well as the spiritual.

Symmetrical Training

There can be no complete development of child or of man on simply departmental lines. His training must cover, if it is to be

genuine and complete, the full characteristics and qualities that go to make a useful man or woman. When we contemplate the work in the protection of children, we must realize that for that work to reach its proper place, public sentiment must be applied and people must understand what is necessary for the mental development; what is necessary for the physical protection; what is necessary for the moral growth, as well as what should be taught for the spiritual future of the child.

We have in our country a great organization of men called "The Laymen's Foreign Mission Brotherhood." Against it I utter no criticism. About it I have nothing to say but praise. But I cannot help feeling that the boys and girls of our own country need something, too. I cannot feel that it is necessary to cross the great Pacific and mingle with the yellow and brown skins and the black skins in Africa, to have something so far off that it has to arouse the imagination, before we can bring to our heart real joy and serve our Maker as faithful children, while right here at our homes, by our firesides almost, there are flaxen-haired boys and girls growing up starved mentally, starved physically, starved morally and spiritually.

If we expect to do for these children all to which they are entitled, if we expect to render them full service, then we must teach the people, we must let them understand. I do not believe the men and women of this city or state or nation are careless about the welfare of their fellows. I do not believe they really are more interested in a little Korean or a little Chinaman than they are in the Caucasian right in our own town. It is because the one has been taught them and talked to them in season and out of season, and the other has been neglected; not often referred to in the pulpit, not often referred to by laymen's organizations. They are simply forgetful and unconscious of the opportunities right at the very gates of Jerusalem. The time has passed when any man can raise the objection, when legislation, state or national, is proposed to help the child, that paternalism is threatened. It is not paternalism that he is so much afraid of, it is too much patriotism. The states will readily respond, if the people only understand.

You have made great progress. The work of protecting the children from the workshop and factory has grown all over our land. It took England over a hundred years to arouse the people

of that country to the fear that they were, from an economic standpoint, destroying the power of their country by consuming the useful hours of the children's life at brutal and destructive labor. Our people are realizing it rapidly. The difficulty that really confronts us is that a small organization with a purpose is dangerous as an antagonist against the great body of people who lack organization. For this very reason it is necessary to get the people to really think. Children must be trained for the great civic responsibility that rests upon them, that they may learn to watch and know what takes place in legislative halls, and then they will be ready if a law comes before a deliberative body, to know who represent them, for the protection of their own mental and physical well being. They will be watchful and call to speedy account the legislator who is faithless to the great trust which we all carry and owe to the children of our land.

Investigation

And beyond our duty to create a wholesome sentiment, to produce an organization back of the protection of children in legislative halls, there is another great duty that rests upon us that the state cannot reach. It is the responsibility of individual inquiry; of individual investigation. Suppose it were possible to arouse the women of any city in our country to a consciousness that there are little boys and girls in homes without food, where they are growing up starved mentally while they are starving physically. Do you suppose they would wear themselves out trying to find something to amuse themselves? Oh, they would not. It is because they do not know; it is because they do not understand; it is because they have not been turned to this great work. In this city of ours, if we had the women here and they could be told the story, if we produced the machinery to furnish them the instances where the opportunity was given to go to a family in want, to a widow with her two or three little boys out on the streets at eight and ten years of age, subjected to all kinds of temptations as they help to make a living selling a paper for two pennies, and the girl in want and in danger of worse, they would go to that family with hearts full of love, to carry a charity that would help put these children in a position to prepare themselves to be independent when manhood and womanhood come.