This time it was a beautiful, young missionary mother who answered quickly:—

“The greatest need of the children in Syria is educated motherhood. They are born, carried around, and then turned loose to do as they please as soon as they are able to toddle. It would mean that they would be kept clean physically, would be properly fed, taught, and trained.”

“What is the greatest need of the children in Persia?”

The answer came from a father of little children who had himself been a missionary’s child in Persia and knew well the country and its needs.

“What Persian children need is proper home environment.” A splendid Christian teacher was talking with one of the boys of our Moslem school about personal purity. “That is all very well,” responded the boy, “but what do you really expect of me with my training and home life when my father has had one hundred and five wives?”

“What do the children of America need?”

We turn and ask ourselves and one another this question. And lo!—we find that the needs of childhood are very much the same the world around. What is being done to meet those needs? Ah! that is a very different question, and startling, yes, more than startling, are the contrasts discovered as the thoughtful woman studies the subject of child life.

The “unity of childhood” throughout the world makes this a vital question to all fathers and mothers, to educators, religious and social workers, to every thinking man and woman. So urgent a question has it become in many Christian lands that this has been aptly called “the age of the child.” In our own land the needs and rights of the child are being discussed on every hand, and through the Public Schools, Juvenile Courts, Juvenile Commissions, Federal Children’s Bureau, Playground Movement, Child Welfare Exhibits, Child Labor laws, and numerous other agencies we are striving to deal with the problem that involves the whole future of our land for weal or woe.

But just as I cannot care for the interests of my child alone, but must recognize that his life will be vitally influenced by whatever concerns his playmates and schoolmates, so I must inevitably be drawn into consideration of what is due to the children of the community, the state, the country, the world. What right have I to demand that my baby be well fed, my child be protected by laws that ensure his safety, that proper schools be provided for his education, that my daughter’s purity and girlhood be respected, unless I concede that right to every mother in the world and care whether she has that right or not?

One earnest mother heart poured itself out in these words when it was planned that the women’s missionary societies should take up the study of the children of non-Christian lands:—

“Sometimes I almost resent the absurd extremes of tenderness and care for babies here, when I think of the world of neglected children. It seems to me, our Women’s Missionary Societies are just a great, beautiful, organized motherhood for the world, and the women don’t half know or appreciate this or they would be swarming in by thousands and giving their money by millions.”

If any woman is tempted to feel that the problems of our own land are so overwhelming and so imperative as to demand all our time and strength and attention, let her read what is said on this subject by Edward T. Devine, the eminent writer and professor and social worker, who is one of the greatest leaders in all lines of child welfare and general welfare work in America. Dr. Devine links our obligations to foreign lands inseparably to our duties to our own country.

Our responsibility to foreign peoples,—our responsibility to immigrants who come to live in America, and to the negroes whom our own ancestors brought here by force, our responsibility to all those who for any reason do not fully share in that degree of prosperity and in that type of civilization which are our heritage, thus becomes clear and is seen to be at one with our direct personal responsibility towards those who for any reason need our sympathy, our fraternal co-operation, and our personal help.[1]

Couple with the utterances quoted above such words as the following by Alonzo Bunker, whose faithful labors among the Karens of Burma have worked wonders in the transformation of a race, and it seems as though no conscientious, intelligent man or woman would need to go further for proof that the awakening social conscience regarding the welfare of children in our own land must include in its study and its efforts for improvement the children of all lands.

This unity of childhood marks the unity of the human race, and the saying that “human nature is the same in all the world” gains new emphasis when studied from the standpoint of the child.

... These characteristics which mark the unity of childhood among all races, sometimes appear to be accentuated among less intelligent peoples; so that, before the fogs of sin and ignorance have blurred the image of God in which they were created, they show a strength and brightness more marked than in their more favored brothers and sisters in enlightened lands. This fact has not received due attention in ethnological studies.[2]

Every child has the inalienable right to be well-born, to be welcomed, to be properly cared for and trained through the years of helplessness and development, to follow his instinct for healthful play, to receive an education sufficient to make him a self-supporting, useful member of society, to have such moral and spiritual training as will develop the highest type of character of which he is capable.

Every mother has the right to accept the duties, responsibilities, and sufferings of motherhood of her own free will, to be surrounded by such conditions as will help her to bring her child into the world with the greatest possible safety to her own life and health and to those of her child, and to loving care during her days of weakness and recuperation.

Where the rights of mothers and children are not thus recognized and guarded, we have a condition that endangers the welfare of the race and leads to its deterioration. Every nation has looked well to the conservation of some part of its human resources,—to its royal line, to its soldiers or sailors, to its wise men and astrologers, to its priests and religious leaders.

The well-known methods of ancient Sparta, which consisted in destroying all weak children and submitting all boys of seven years old and upward to the most rigorous training under state educators, resulted in producing a race of warriors. Fighting men were what Sparta wanted, and fighting men she produced. The possible heir to a throne in modern times must have no drop of common blood in his veins. Royalty must