WHAT WE OWE TO POOR CHILDREN.
By Hezekiah Butterworth
THE world owes some of its richest treasures to those who were deemed unfortunate in youth, and who looked to others at that unsheltered period for pity, protection and help. Our country was discovered by Columbus. He was a hard-worked boy, and often knew the need of sufficient food. We owe our freedom of religion, which has made our institutions what they are, to Luther. The reformer once sung ballads in the street to procure the means of an education Our advances in science started with Franklin; yet the inventor ate his penny roll in the city of Philadelphia when a lad, and knew what it was to feel all alone in the world. We owe the beginning of our cotton mills to Sir Richard Arkwright. He was the youngest of a poor family of thirteen children, and his father was a barber. The curse of slavery was removed from our land by the pen-stroke of Abraham Lincoln. He ate the bread of hardship in childhood, and went as poorly clad as the humblest child in the streets of any country village to-day. The President-elect of the United States was once a poor, hard-working, friendless boy. The great missionary of the century is Dr. Livingstone. He learned Latin from a book on his loom while at work, and he once said proudly on completing his education, "I never had a dollar that I did not earn." Professor Heyne, one of the greatest scholars that Germany or the world ever produced, was a penniless child. "Want," said he, "was the companion of my childhood. I well remember my mother's distress, when without food for her children. I have seen her on a Saturday evening weeping and wringing her hands as she returned home, having been unable to sell the goods that my father had made." A kind family helped him in his distress at school, and in so doing honored themselves and their country in a way of which they did not dream. Some forty years ago, there lived in one of the country towns of New York a slender little factory-girl. She speaks of her early recollections of "noise and filth, bleeding hands, sore feet and a very sad heart." She says, "I used often to rise at two o'clock in the morning, and do the washing for the family." She found friends. That girl was Emily Chubbuck Judson. He who protects, assists, educates friendless children, makes the best contribution to the future that human resource can find. He builds himself a monument, not in marble, but in influence. Lips will call him blessed when the moss is filling the letters of his cenotaph. He lives for ends that do not terminate in himself.—Hezekiah Butterworth, in Childhood's Appeal.