| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I. | The Right of the Child to Choose His Parents | [1] |
| II. | The Unborn Race and Woman's Work | [63] |
| III. | Education | [106] |
| IV. | Homelessness | [191] |
| V. | Soul Murder in the Schools | [203] |
| VI. | The School of the Future | [233] |
| VII. | Religious Instruction | [284] |
| VIII. | Child Labour and the Crimes of Children | [316] |
The Century of the Child
CHAPTER I THE RIGHT OF THE CHILD TO CHOOSE HIS PARENTS
Filled with sad memories or eager hopes, people waited for the turn of the century, and as the clock struck twelve, felt innumerable undefined forebodings. They felt that the new century would certainly give them only one thing, peace. They felt that those who are labouring to-day would witness no new development in that process of change to which they had consciously or unconsciously contributed their quota.
The events at the turn of the century caused the new century to be represented as a small naked child, descending upon the earth, but drawing himself back in terror at the sight of a world bristling with weapons, a world in which for the opening century there was not an inch of free ground to set one's foot upon. Many people thought over the significance of this picture; they thought how in economic and in actual warfare all the lower passions of man were still aroused; how despite all the tremendous development of civilisation in the century just passed, man had not yet succeeded in giving to the struggle for existence nobler forms. Certainly to the question why this still is so, very different answers were given. Some contented themselves with declaring, after consideration, that things must remain just as they are, since human nature remains the same; that hunger, the propagation of the race, the desire for gold and power, will always control the course of the world. Others again were convinced that if the teaching which has tried in vain for nineteen hundred years to transform the course of the world could one day become a living reality in the souls of men, swords would be turned into pruning hooks.
My conviction is just the opposite. It is that nothing will be different in the mass except in so far as human nature itself is transformed, and that this transformation will take place, not when the whole of humanity becomes Christian, but when the whole of humanity awakens to the consciousness of the "holiness of generation." This consciousness will make the central work of society the new race, its origin, its management, and its education; about these all morals, all laws, all social arrangements will be grouped. This will form the point of view from which all other questions will be judged, all other regulations made. Up to now we have only heard in academic speeches and in pedagogical essays that the training of youth is the highest function of a nation. In reality, in the family, in the school, and in the state, quite other standards are put in the foreground.
The new view of the "holiness of generation" will not be held by mankind until it has seriously abandoned the Christian point of view and taken the view, born thousands of years ago, whose victory has been first foreshadowed in the century just completed.