That Last Waif; or, Social QuarantineFletcher, Horace
History
That Last Waif; or, Social Quarantine
Fletcher, Horace
Child welfare
Child-training and child-saving experiments, within the past
twenty-five years have proven by results, that there is no necessity
of a Have-To-Be-Bad class of citizens, and that such a class of
non-producing depredators in a community is the result of neglect,
whose cost of prevention would not be a tithe of the present cost of
futile attempts at correction by punishment.
* * * * *
Man reads the messages of Creation in its works, and has proven by
centuries of experiment with his mental and physical equipments that
while God creates all things capable of harmony, or good, Man is the
one expression of His creation to whom is delegated the power of
selection, direction and cultivation. God gives the force and the
material, but man is given the unique capacity to aim, select, direct,
cultivate and harmonize. Even the lightning, in the hands of Man, is
applied to harmony and _construction_, and is diverted from discord
and _destruction_.
In Man's ceaseless experimentation with his growing mental and
physical equipments, and with the exterior forces of Nature, he has
discovered that he can gather and direct the lightning; cultivate a
skimpy wild flower into the imperial chrysanthemum; care for the
elemental horse of his earliest discovery until it has developed into
the "Black Beauty" of the present day; and, "last but not least,"
within only one brief quarter of one brief century, he has discovered
that his greatest possibility of happiness lies in his power to make
good and useful citizens of all his family.
Happiness is _the evidence and fruit of conscious usefulness_.
Usefulness in adding to the sum of usefulness is, therefore, the best
fruit of effort, and _child culture produces such fruit in abundance_.
* * * * *
God reveals, therefore, in His Work, what is not contradicted in His
Word, when interpreted aright, that He creates all things good,
subject to the possibility of Man to cultivate and harmonize and
points out, as of first importance, a plant which has stored within it
possibilities of endless further cultivation, of itself, and all else
in Creation--the plant which we call a child.
Shall society do its duty to _all_ of these or only such as chance has
favored with superior parentage?
Have we not arrived at the point of concrete intelligence when we
should assist in the fulfillment of the prophecy, "And the Last Shall
Be First," coupled with that other prophecy of the Master of our
Christian Civilization, "And a Little Child Shall Lead Them."
* * * * *
And finally, the way?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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