The Child in Human Progress

by George Henry Payne

MARY ELLEN AND THE SCISSORS WITH WHICH SHE WAS BEATEN

“Every historian ought to be a jurist; every jurist ought to be a historian,” says Ortolan, and the historian of child progress feels not only the truth of that statement but the added necessity of meeting the various economic theories that have dealt with the care of the child, from those of Lycurgus to the latter-day essay of Malthus.

The law of primogeniture and the varying laws of inheritance have occasionally led to the study of children as children, but generally the main interest in them of historian and jurist has been as a channel for the transmission of property.

Theories about population and the fascinating pursuit of unravelling tangled economic laws, have obscured the fact that the attitude of a state toward children has been, with few variations, an index to its social progress. The same thing has been said of women, but while the Greeks treated women well, yet with the exception of the single dema[10] of Thebes, infanticide was common in all the Greek States.

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.