It was long before women began to be counted at all, and they are still only half-counted. Children are still under “besides.” But some day we may perhaps have come so far in our feeling for what is coming on, that we shall invert the order and reckon “so many children—besides women and men.” We shall then give evidence in our treatment of children of our reverence for these profoundly wise and mysterious beings, whom we never fathom. We shall see behind the figure of every child the infinite line of past generations, before it the equally endless ranks of those to come. We shall remember in our actions that the child is the sum of these dead ones, the hope of those unborn. We shall let the child reveal itself and receive its revelations with a discretion at present unsuspected.
The tragedies of the childish soul are still waiting for their Shakespeare, although the child is already appearing in literature as never before. And here, as ever, literature is the precursor of the great movement of liberty which shall bring the children’s declaration of rights and make an end of the spiritual and bodily ill-treatment of children, which must appear to the future as monstrous as negro slavery does to us. It may be that children too will have their right to vote, as well as their own representatives in the legislature and in the courts of law.[6]
It should be the collective mothers who would thus finally liberate the children of society. It will then be seen that the octave of the child’s soul was just as indispensable as that of woman or man, in order that the great harmony of humanity might be complete.
When this happens the third kingdom will have arrived, whose Messiah the age now awaits. But it is not in the lap of collective motherliness that he will be borne.
Again and again saviours will be born to humanity. But always of some young woman with forehead pure as a lily and deep eyes. And Bethlehem will always be there, where a young mother kneels in prayer by her child’s cradle.
CHAPTER VIII
FREE DIVORCE
The desire of the young to abolish prostitution by means of love’s freedom has already been adduced as one of the proofs of the higher development of sexual morality. Another such proof is the desire of the present day to abolish adultery by means of free divorce.
The preachers of monogamy are afraid that this desire will prepare the way for an open polygamy, instead of that which at present is at least secret. In the press and in the pulpit, in schoolrooms and lecture-rooms, modern literature is blamed for this “new immorality.”