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Page 8
One of our sweetest poets, Charles Tennyson Turner, in an exquisite
sonnet on a three-year-old child being presented with a toy globe, has
portrayed the consecration of a child's innocence, bathing the world
itself in its baptismal dew:
"She patted all the world; old empires peep'd
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers."
And when at length they turn "her sweet unlearned eye" "on our own
isle," she utters a little joyous cry:
"Oh yes, I see it! Letty's home is there!
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair."
By the side of that exquisite picture of the beatitude of a child's
innocence place the picture of that long procession of desecrated
children, with no "sweet unlearned eye," but eyes learned in the worst
forms of human wickedness and cruelty; and let any woman say, if she can
or dare, that this is a subject on which she is not called to have any
voice and which she prefers to let alone. Surely our womanhood has not
become in these last days such a withered and wilted thing that our ears
have grown too nice for the cry of these hapless children! As women, we
are the natural guardians of the innocence of all children. The divine
motherhood that is at the heart of every woman worthy of the name "rises
up in wrath" within us and cries: "We _will_ fulfil our trust, not only
to our own children, but to the helpless children of the poor." The day
is at hand when every mother of boys will silently vow before God to
send at least one knight of God into the world to fight an evil before
which even a child's innocence is not sacred and which tramples under
its swine's feet the weak and the helpless.
Indeed, when one reflects that this great moral problem touches all the
great trusts of our womanhood, the sanctity of the family, the purity of
the home, the sacredness of marriage, the sweet innocence of children,
it seems like some evil dream that women can ever have asked, "Why
cannot I leave this matter to men? Why should I interfere?"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Dr. Carpenter does not hesitate to attribute this sharp dip
in the male line of life to the indulgence of the passions in youth, and
the subsequent rise to marriage and a more regular life.]
[Footnote 2: _Pendennis_, vol. i., p. 16.]
CHAPTER III
FIRST PRINCIPLES
"But what can we do?" will be the next question, uttered perhaps in the
forlorn accents of a latent despair.
Before answering this question in detail, I would endeavor to impress
two cardinal points upon you.
The first point I want you to recognize, though it may seem to minister
to the very hopelessness which most lames and cripples for effective
action, is the depth and magnitude of the problem we have to grapple
with. All other great social evils, with the possible exception of greed
or covetousness, which in Scripture is often classed with impurity, may
be looked upon as more or less diseases of the extremities. But the evil
which we are now considering is no disease of the extremities, but a
disease at the very heart of our life, attacking all the great bases on
which it rests. It is not only the negation of the sanctity of the
family and the destroyer of the purity of the home, as I have already
pointed out, but it is also the derider of the sacredness of the
individual, the slow but sure disintegrator of the body politic, the
dry-rot of nations, before which the mightiest empires have crumbled
into dust. The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of
her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes.
The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it.
The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it
became the most transitory. Even the vast and massive structure of the
Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, vanished before barbarian
hordes like the baseless fabric of a dream. To think that we can solve a
problem of this depth and magnitude by any mere external means--as so
many good and earnest women seem to imagine--by any multiplication of
Rescue Societies, Preventive Institutions, and other benevolent
organizations--is to think that we can plug up a volcano with sticks and
straws. The remedy, like the evil, must be from within, and must to a
great degree revolutionize our life.
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