Their Yesterdays

by Harold Bell Wright

In childhood, the Master of Life exalts Life. A baby in its mother's arms is the fullest expression of Divinity.

It was Christmas time; that season of the year when, for a brief period, the world permits the children to occupy the place in the affairs and thoughts of men that is theirs by divine right.

In the birth of that babe in Bethlehem, the Giver of Life placed the seal of his highest approval upon childhood and decreed that, until the end of time, babies should be the true rulers of mankind and the lawful heirs of heaven. And it is so, that the power of Mary's babe, from his manger cradle throne, has been more potent on earth in the governments of men than the strength of many emperors with their armed hosts.

It is written large in Nature's laws that mankind should be governed by love of children. The ruling purpose and passion of the race can be, with safety, nothing less than the purpose and passion of all created things—of even the trees and plants—the purpose to reproduce its kind—the passion for its offspring. The world should be ruled by boys and girls.

But Mammon has usurped the throne of Life. His hosts have trampled the banners of loyal love in the dust. His forces have compelled the rightful rulers of the world to abdicate. But, even as gross materialism has never succeeded in altogether denying Divinity, so, for a few days each year, at Christmas time, childhood asserts its claims and compels mankind to render, at least a show, of homage.

Poor, blind, deceived and betrayed, old world; to so fear a foolish and impotent anarchism that spends its strength in vain railings against governments while you pay highest honors and present your choicest favors to those traitors who filch your wealth of young life under pretense of loyal service. The real anarchists, old world, are not those who loudly vociferate to the rabble on the street corners but those who, operating under the laws of your approval, betray their country in its greatest need—its need of children. The real anarchists, old world, are those whose banners are made red by the blood of babies; who fatten upon the labor of their child slaves; and who seek to rule by the slaughter of children even as that savage of old whose name in history is hated by every lover of the race. Regicides at heart, they are, for they kill, for a price, the God ordained rulers of mankind. A child is nearer, by many years, to God than the grown up rebel who traitorously holds his own mean interests superior to the holy will of Life as vested in the sacred person of a boy or girl.

To prate, in empty swelling words, of the sacredness of life, the power of religion, the dignity of state, the importance of commercial interests and the natural wealth of the nation, while ignoring the sacredness, power, dignity, importance, and wealth of childhood, is evidence of a criminal thoughtlessness.

Children and Life are one. They are the product, the producers, and the preservers of Life. They exalt Life. They interpret Life. Without them Life has no meaning. The child is no more the possession of its parents than the parents are the property of the child. Children are the just creditors of the human race. Mankind owes them everything. They owe mankind nothing. A baby has no debts.

Nor is the passion for children satisfied only in bearing them. A woman who does not love all babies is unsafe to trust with one of her own flesh. A man who does not love all children is unfit to father offspring of his own blood. One need not die to orphan a child. One need only refuse to care for it. One need only place other interests first. Men and women who desire to become parents will not go unsatisfied in a world that is so full of boys and girls for whom there are neither fathers nor mothers.

The Master of Life said: "Except ye become as little children." His false disciple—world—teaches: "Except ye become grown up." But the laws of Life are irrevocable. If a man, heeding the world, grows up to possess the earth, his holdings, at the last, are reduced—if he be one of earth's big men—to six feet of it, only; while the man who never grows up inherits a heaven that the false kings of earth know not.