Do you question the young children in the sorrow, Why their tears are falling so? The old man may weep for his to-morrow Which is lost in long ago; The old tree is leafless in the forest, The old year is ending in the frost, The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest, The old hope is hardest to be lost; But the young, young children, O my brothers, Do you ask them why they stand Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers, In our happy Fatherland? Go out, children, from the mine and from the city, Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do. Pluck your handfuls of the meadow cowslips pretty, Laugh aloud to feel your fingers let them through! Only in recent years has there grown into fulness a conception of what the duty of society is towards the child. For near two thousand years it was a world of grown-ups for grown-ups. Children there have been--many millions of them--but they were merely incidental to the scheme of things. Society regarded them not as an asset, except perhaps for purposes of selfish exploitation. If literature reflects contemporary life with fidelity, we may well marvel that for so many hundreds of years the boys and girls of their generation were so little regarded that they are rarely mentioned in song or story. When they are, we are afforded glimpses of a curious attitude of aloofness or of harshness. Nowhere do we meet the artlessness of childhood. In a footnote here, in a marginal gloss there, such references as appear point to torture and cruelty, to distress and tears. In the early legends of the Christians, in the pagan ballads of the olden time, what there is of child life but illustrates the brutal selfishness of the elders. Certainly, no people understood as well as did the Jews that the child is the prophecy of the future, and that a nation is kept alive not by memory but by hope. Childhood to them was "the sign of fulfillment of glorious promises; the burden of psalm and prophecy was of a golden age to come, not of one that was in the dim past." So in the greatest of all books we come frequently upon phrases displaying this attitude: "There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and every man with his staff in his hand for very age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof." "They shall remember me in far countries; and they shall live with their children." And most significant of all: "Suffer the little children to come unto me."