What are the rights of children? Let us consider them for a moment as a social class, as a class of workers, for as a fact they are laboring to produce men. They are the future generation. They work, undergoing the fatigues of physical and spiritual growth. They continue the work carried on for a few months by their mothers, but their task is a more laborious, complex, and difficult one. When they are born they possess nothing but potentialities; they have to do everything in a world which, as even adults admit, is full of difficulties. What is done to help these frail pilgrims in an unknown world? They are born more fragile and helpless than an animal, and in a few years they have to become men, to be units in a highly complicated organized society, built up by the secular effort of innumerable generations. At a period in which civilization, that is, the possibility of right living, is based upon rights energetically acquired and consecrated by laws, what rights has he who comes among us without strength and without thought? Like the infant Moses lying in the ark of bulrushes on the waters of the Nile he represents the future of the chosen people; but will some princess passing by perchance see him? To chance, to luck, to affection, to all these we entrust the child; and it would seem that the Biblical chastisement of the Egyptian oppressor, the death of the first-born, is to be unceasingly renewed. Let us see how social justice receives the infant when he enters the world. We are living in the twentieth century; in many of the so-called civilized nations orphan asylums and wet nurses are still recognized _institutions_. What is an orphan asylum? It is a place of sequestration, a dark and terrible prison, where only too often the prisoner finds death, as in those medieval dungeons whence the victim disappeared, leaving no trace. He never sees any who are dear to him. His family name is cancelled, his goods are confiscated. The greatest criminal may retain memories of his mother, knows that he has had a name, and may derive some consolation from his recollections, comparable to the soothing reflections of one who having become blind recalls the beauty of colors and the splendor of the sun; but the foundling is as one born blind. Every malefactor has more rights than he; and yet who could be more innocent? Even in the days of the most odious tyranny, the spectacle of oppressed innocence kindled a flame of justice that sooner or later blazed up into revolution. The persons imprisoned by tyrants because they had happened to be witnesses of their crimes, and who were cast into dungeons where darkness and inaudible suffering were henceforth their unhappy portion, at least roused the people to proclaim the principle of equal justice for all. But who will lift up his voice for our foundlings? Society does not perceive that they too are men; they are indeed only the "flowers" of humanity. And to save honor and good name, what