George Henry Payne

“ Any one truly may not expect that they would abstain from the blood of others who do not abstain even from their own. But these are without any controversy wicked and unjust. What are they whom a false piety compels to expose their children? Can they be considered innocent who expose their own offspring as a prey to dogs, and as far as it depends upon themselves, kill them in a more cruel manner than if they had strangled them? ”

“ From there on to the time when the child, as the father of the man, is a charge upon the State,—or on all men,—until it is able to take care of and protect itself, the murder of a child is theoretically as great a crime as the murder of an adult. ”

“ The ancient Emperors wept bitterly over these faults of the people and pardoned crimes, and by that spirit imitated the Spirit of Heaven, who loves to give life. When one of our officers addresses us a report concerning a great wrong, we first look to save the life; if it is not possible to use clemency, and if it is necessary that we pronounce the sentence of death, such a decision causes us genuine sadness. How great ought to be our sorrow, however, at the sight of an infant that had hardly been born, condemned to death. ”

“ It matters little whether or not the Romulus of Plutarch and Dionysius existed; it does matter that the human note was in the laws of his time, and that citizens of the new city were enjoined not only to bring up all healthy male children—and at least one female child—but that all children must be allowed to live until they were three years old, unless they were lame or monstrous. ”

“ Like all other lawmakers—even legendary ones—especially those who sought to prepare and safeguard their states for and against hostile neighbours, the first concern of the founder of Rome was a strong nation; and a strong nation meant necessarily as many adult males in good health and physical condition as possible. Soldiers were more important than other human beings; in this the supposed founder followed the spirit of his time and the standard of his age of development. ”

“ Inquiries show that in many districts as large a portion as one fourth of the female children born are destroyed at birth. At Pekin, on the other hand, it cannot be said to exist at all. But in this as in so many social offences in China, the sword of the law, which is alone capable of putting down crime, is allowed to hang like a rusty weapon on the wall. ”

“ When we come to trace the attitude of other races, of other civilizations, toward children, we find much the same story: out of barbarism, civilization; out of civilization, humanity, though it has been usually the great Semitic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism—that have awakened the humane instinct the world over. The humane teachings of the Stoics were not unlike those of the great religious teachers, but, lacking the intense driving power of religious fervour, it is doubtful if they could have accomplished the revolutions that these three religions did. ”

“ Northern Europe was colder, more swampy, and more desolate then than it is now and across the bleak and uncultivated country, country such as one finds nowhere in Europe today but on the professional and bleak battlefields of Bulgaria and Servia, the half-starved peasants tramped, each with his group of children to place on sale when the coasts of Italy or France were reached. ”

“ Every human being had a soul—that was a vital point in their fight. They asserted that children had souls, to which religious doctrine probably more is due in the way of checking the practice of infanticide than any other single idea. We have seen how Plutarch, the polished philosopher, had gone as far as the pagan mind could under its philosophy, in directing thought as to man’s responsibility for actions toward the child, by collecting opinions of the philosophers as to when an unborn child became a human being. ”

“ While neither the lion or the tiger ever troubled Japan and her most carnivorous and destructive animals have been wolves, tradition has ascribed the sacrifice of human beings in Japan to the desire to placate the god of wild animals. The victim was always a girl, and from the earliest ages the manner of selecting her was to affix to the roof of a house a bow and arrow. When the householder arose in the morning and discovered what was accepted as a divine intimation, the eldest daughter of the family was buried alive, it being supposed that her flesh served as a meal for the deity. ”

“ Let us view the entire miserable family shivering, trembling, blind, mutilated, perishing from hunger—in fact, already half dead. Let us go to the origin of all these ills—a laboratory for the manufacture of human wrecks—a cavern filled with the limbs torn from living children—each has a different profession, a different mutilation has given each a different occupation. ”

“ In prehistoric times, the chief of the yevos exercised his right of domain over his own house, by deciding whether children should be brought up or exposed. The reason back of this practice was undoubtedly economic: “the fact of yesterday is the doctrine of today,” says Junius.
The Hellenes in their attitude toward children were as all the Aryan people, and, with few exceptions, as most primitive people where moral ideas had little developed; the right of the male parent to kill his child if he so willed is, with variations, a relic of the Stone Age. ”

“ The poor girl, sobbing and sighing, and muttering words of complaint, claims pity from those who will show none. If she resists the mandates of her father, he strikes her with his spear; if she rebels and screams, the blows are repeated ”

“ The rich father of Daphnis considered a son and a daughter a large family.
At a pinch, the Athenians would undertake to bring up a first child, but, as a rule, the second was condemned. It was not for themselves, alone, that this was done, they claimed: it was also for their children that the heads of the Greek families dreaded poverty. The direct transmission and equal partition of property among the male children was part of the Greek law, and a fair-sized estate, if broken into many parts, made small provision for many children. ”

“ EXPOSURE BY A CIVILIZED PEOPLE—LACK OF HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS—THEIR MYTHOLOGY AN EVIDENCE—CHILDREN IN HOMER.
THAT the people of the greatest nation of antiquity, with all their intellect, their subtlety, their productivity in humanity, art, and moral ideas, were wanting in heart, is the statement of one of the greatest scholars of modern times, a scholar who has also earned the right to be classed among the admirers and defenders of the Greeks. ”

“ It has been said that the social, moral, and intellectual condition of woman indicates, in an ascending scale, the degree of civilization of every tribe44 and nation. It might with equal force be said that the attitude of the tribe or nation toward its young is also a barometer of progress. Behind the harsh measure and savage customs, underneath the cruelty and at times ferocious indifference to pain, there is in general among the lowest of the tribes an affection for their young, once it has been decided that they are allowed to live. ”

“ This is Lactantius’s plea for the new-born, from the sixth book of his Divine Institutes365:
“Therefore let no one imagine that even this is allowed, to strangle newly born children, which is the greatest impiety; for God breathes into their souls for life, and not for death. But men, that there may be no crime with which they may not pollute their hands, deprive souls, as yet innocent and simple, of the light which they themselves have not given. ”

“ If the mother of an infant died, the right of Hidana, or infant education, rested with the maternal grandmother. So deeply was this idea imbued that even if the mother were a hated Zimmi or female infidel subject, married to a Mussulman, she was still entitled to the Hidana of her child until the time when the child was capable of forming a judgment with respect to religion. When such a time arrived the child was generally taken from the mother if she continued to be an infidel, in order that no injury might come to it from imbibing the doctrines of a Zimmi. ”

“ Occasionally, in times past, strangers had picked up children exposed by their parents and had reared them as slaves, or maimed and blinded them for the profession of begging. Augustus set aside a reward of two thousand sesterces (about $40.00) for the person who would rear an orphan. This was the seed of a growing humanity, the first intimation of an inclination to treat children with kindness, though it contrasts with Augustus’s own personal conduct when his anger was aroused. ”

“ It is therefore not surprising that we find among 107the Egyptians, just as we find among the Sumerians and the Akkadians, who were contemporaneous in civilization about four and five thousand years before Christ, that the attitude toward children is settled, and apparently in the child’s favour; for aside from occasional sacrificial offerings in which the child is on a par at least with the slave or the servant about to be sacrificed, there is no evidence of the endeavour to do away with the children on the scale that we find in ancient Greece and Rome and later in India and China. ”

“ Someone else picks them up out of commiseration and, in order to defray the expenses of bringing the child up, cuts off one of its limbs. Today, when they are demanding charity, that life that they owe to the pity of one, they are sustaining at the expense and through the pity of all. ”

“ Ever since the beginning of that indefinite period which we call ‘modern times’ the birth of a child has always been an occasion for rejoicing. To be sure, in Japan that joy was very much greater when it was a boy baby; yet the Japanese have never displayed such intense dislike to girl babies as have the Chinese. One great reason89 for this was that the population of Japan was not so dense as it is in China. It was easier to provide for children, and therefore there was no incentive to put girl babies out of the way. ”

“ In many ways the treatment of children by the various races and sects inhabiting Northern Syria differs vastly from that practised in other countries. Strangely similar in one particular to the custom of the American Indian, immediately after birth the child is wrapped in cloths until it resembles the form of a mummy of ancient Egyptian times, in which state it is kept and carried about by nurses and small children until it is considered old enough to learn to walk, when it is given the freedom of its limbs. ”

“ The society that was able to exist in primitive times was always the one that sacrificed the individual,8 and the infant was naturally low in the scale of value. That very sacrifice of the weakest, stratified into a national characteristic, produced in the greatest civilization of ancient times, a narrow and egoistical morality, with little conception of what we call humanity. “No Greek ever6 attained the sublimity of such a point of view,” says George Henry Lewes.9
In this, the “century of the child,” there is a great conception of humanity, and even of children’s rights. ”

“ As among the Spanish races in general, great affection is shown to children. Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters lavish caresses upon them continually and in public.
There being few factories in the Dominican Republic, child labour, as we know it, does not exist. Children early begin to earn their living, but the work is mostly in the open air or open shops and labour conditions are far from strenuous. The clothing worn by children is scant, and youngsters of the lower classes up to the age of five or six years usually run nude, decorated only by a necklace or a pair of earrings. ”

“ The paternal emotions come from nature and there ought not be any difference in the manner of treating sons and daughters. Why should parents conduct themselves cruelly toward girl babies and condemn them to death? Meng Tse has said:
“‘When one sees an infant on the point of falling into a well every man feels in his heart the sentiments of fear and compassion.’
“Here, however, it is not a question of strangers or of passers-by. Since all men are moved at the sight of an infant in danger when that infant is a stranger, what kind of parents must those be who deprive their own children of life? ”

“ The result of this system of family life was that where the children of different mothers but of the same father discovered one another’s presence there were feuds and much fighting, especially as it was the children of the latest affection who were generally the recipients of his favour to the chagrin and anger of the less favoured children and families. ”

“ Undoubtedly, more serious thought is being given in the present generation to the subject than has ever been given before in the entire history of the world. More has been written about the child in the last fifty years than had been written in the world in all civilized times up to the beginning of this half-century. In order to appreciate this statement one must remember that the best friends of the child—Jesus, the Jewish Prophets, and Mohammed—lived centuries before the human theories that they preached had really a living existence. ”

“ In India, as we shall see, children were frankly killed for economic reasons; but here too there are evidences of the sacrifice theory. Up to the beginning of the present century, the custom of offering a first-born child to the Ganges was common. A custom akin to this was that of the Ganga Jatra, the murder of sick relatives on the banks of the sacred river. As late as 1812, a mother and sister burned a leper at Katwa near Calcutta, their excuse being that by so doing he would be given a pure body in the next world. ”

“ Studying the cross currents and the ever-present struggle for existence of the various nations that worked out of barbarism to civilization, we see that after all it is by and through the very virtues, tenderness, sympathy, and humanity, that were first aroused by the helpless offspring, that the infant comes in turn to be protected, though the path is frequently a tortuous one. ”

“ In fact, unborn children are sometimes provisionally engaged to each other by their parents, either for sentimental or financial reasons. Perhaps three-fourths of the girls of the country are married before they reach the age of sixteen, and many are married between twelve and fourteen.
The consideration paid on the occasion of the marriage of non-Mohammedan, or Christian and Jewish girls, goes the other way from that paid at the marriage of an Arab girl, it being the desire of the groom to have as large a dowry as possible for his wife, and which goes to help make up the family exchequer. ”

“ Only in two instances as far as we know did the law of the Greeks reach out to protect the child against the destroying whim of the parent. According to Ælian317 the Thebans were not allowed to expose their children or leave them in a wilderness under the pain of death. If the father were extremely poor, the child, whether male or female, had to be brought to the magistrate in its swaddling clothes, and there delivered to some person who would agree to bring up the child and when it was grown up, take it into service and have the benefit of its labour in return for its education. ”

“ Recent excavations have established the fact that the earliest known civilization was in what afterwards came to be known as Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and that groups of people living in cities and calling themselves, in the lower section of the country, the Sumerians, and in the upper section, the Akkadians, dwelt in civilized state until they were conquered by the Semitic peoples. The Semites in their conquest of the Greeks, as we now know, took from the conquered the culture of the race that was physically weaker, as indeed the Gauls did from the Romans. ”

“ How little is the feeling among these people over the murder of children, is shown from the fact that murder is the only outlet for their feelings!
“I have known cases where a man, grieving over the loss of a relative or over some slight that has been put upon him, has set fire to his house, quite regardless of whether any one was inside, with the result, occasionally, that a child is burnt to death, and I recently tried a case of murder which was the direct outcome of grief over the death of a pig. ”