With Trotwood
THE RIGHTS OF CHILDHOOD
[This address, delivered January 18th, 1907, before the convention of the Tennessee County Superintendents and Teachers, is compiled from notes by Mr. Settle of the Daily American, and from memory after delivery by its author, Mr. Moore having made no notes at the time, the speech being the occasion of extemporaneous talks at the close of an educational rally. From many sources has come the request that it be reproduced here.—Editor.]
I thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your very kind introduction concerning my “Bishop of Cottontown,” and the fact that you see in it an appeal for the childhood of the land. And I thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for the privilege of addressing you on this subject, so full of great and far reaching interest. And in the beginning permit me to say to you that I, myself, have been a teacher, and that I consider it the grandest profession of all those which make for the uplifting of the human race, save, perhaps, one. If you doubt that I have been there—to use the pungent vernacular of the times—if you doubt that I am familiar with the hardships, trials, ay, and the triumphs of the average teacher, permit me to relate this anecdote as the stamp of the coin, the chip of the block of the profession.
In my younger days, when the Alabama law required that a teacher should teach hygiene and physiology along with other studies—the object being to show the effects of alcohol on the human body—there came to my school a big, double-jointed plow boy, whose opportunities for education had been few, but he was of that stuff from which many of the great men of the republic have been made. After six months of grammar and hygiene, when the class was required to write a composition on the human anatomy, this is the marvelous work of art handed into me by the man of the plow:
“The human anatermy is devided into three parts, the Head, the Chist and the Stummic. The Head contains the brains, if any. The Chist contains the lights and the liver. The Stummic contains the bowels. There are five bowels, a, e, i, o, u and sometimes w and y.”
Have I not been there, my friends?
The rights of childhood—that is the subject you have given me, Mr. Chairman. Why, you might as well have asked me to speak upon the rights of God. You know, and I know, and all within the sound of my voice know, what are the rights of childhood—the right to an education, to health, to play, to work in proportion to its age and strength, to a fair chance and a square deal in this greatest country of the world’s greatest age.