The Chinese are kind to their women and yet there is no country today where infanticide is more common. The oldest civilization in the world, the Babylonian, was not one in which women were ill-treated, yet all the indications are that infanticide was practised in the shape of human sacrifice. The Rajputs of India pleaded for their privilege of destroying infant children when theirs had been the highest civilization in the world. In other words, disinterested affection for the infant is not necessarily coincident with civilization, or the kind treatment of women a sure sign that the lives of children are safe. Various writers, including Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, and Edward Carpenter, have taken the attitude that our much vaunted civilization does not really represent progress, and one vivacious author[11] has even undertaken to show in a clever and lively way that there is no such thing as progress, pointing to Greek civilization, in which children were killed at will and public men were confessed degenerates, as the ideal from which we of modern times have fallen away. What is undoubtedly true is that civilization does not always indicate social progress, and what is truer is that civilization does not necessarily indicate the _humanization_ of the people. Chremes, the very character in Terence[12] who says “Nothing human is alien to me,” is the one who reproves his wife for not having gotten rid of their child. The advance over Homer as shown by Virgil is that of a great gentleness, a great humaneness,—a difference in their times,—and yet Cicero, who represents the stoical and gentler sentiments of the Virgilian times toward the helpless and powerless victims of force as did no man up to his day, speaks tolerantly of the inhuman practices of his time. But there is a growth of humaneness from Homer to Virgil, there is advance from Plato to Cicero, humanely speaking of course; there was greater advance in the teachings of Christ, and there was further advance in the course of the long-drawn-out struggle between the nominal acceptance of those teachings and their incorporation into the daily philosophy. So, too, progress in the care of the rights of infancy and childhood has been made very little by very little.