That Last Waif; or, Social QuarantineFletcher, Horace
History
That Last Waif; or, Social Quarantine
Fletcher, Horace
Child welfare
"Let us see--four years and five years are nine years. We have just
cleared the home, as well as the foreign, atmosphere of certain
impurities, of lack of respect for us on account of our granger and
commercial habits of prosperity, as if by a flash of lightning, so
that we may work in peace and have plenty of time in the next decade
to prepare for the exposition which we will offer to the world under
the name of United States and Canadian Character Exposition and Peace
Jubilee. When we have opened our exhibit and given our object lesson,
after the manner of the kindergarten, we can say to the world: "Come
and see what we have done with material gathered from all your lands
and nations. Not one race or national ingredient has been omitted from
our brew. What God makes is good and within the power of man to
cultivate into usefulness, and here is the proof of it. Now go home
and do likewise within your own national boundaries, and when you have
produced good material for brotherhood send it to us and we will
welcome it, but until then, the purity of our own establishment
demands that we refuse your neglects who are already too set in
perversion to be easily reformed.
"Good friends of China and of India and of Africa and of the Islands
of the Sea, or any of the so-called semi-civilized or uncivilized
peoples of our earth, we will send you missionaries and show you how
to cultivate what you have as well as the quality of the material will
permit, and we will supply all the world with an object lesson, but we
cannot take your defectives as boarders in our family."
* * * * *
As a logical sequence of a Strict Social Quarantine it is _possible_
for any civilized nation to make such an exhibit as given in the
illustration in ten years, for the area of neglect is very small in
which idleness and disorder and criminality breed, although the area
of disturbance caused is as wide as the world. We say ten years as a
measure of possibility on the authority of proved results, but fifteen
years is a most reasonable time to settle as an aim if attempted by a
majority co-operation.
It has been said that God never hurries. This is true when the
contrast is made between our unit of time and our idea of eternity,
but when His pure atmosphere has been encumbered with intolerable
inconsistencies, He flashes the lightning, and calls the attention of
the world to it by loud thunder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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