But for the horrors of child labor in the carpet trade we must turn to the factories of Kirman.

These factories are filled with children from four years old upward, underfed, overworked, living a loveless, joyless, hopeless life. The factories are built without windows lest the children’s attention should be distracted, and the bad air, want of food, and the constantly keeping in one position produce rickets and deformity in nearly all. Of thirty-eight children examined in one factory, thirty-six were deformed.

One of the Governors of Kirman forbade the employment of children under twelve in the factories, but the order did not last beyond his governorship. The same Governor gave the order still in force, which forbids the employment of children before dawn or after sunset, thus reducing their working hours to an average of twelve hours a day. A recent Governor added to this an order limiting the Friday work to about two and a half hours, “from sunrise to full sunshine,” so now the children share in part the general Friday holiday of Mohammedanism.

One of our medical missionaries was called to attend the wife of the owner of one of these factories, and consented to do so on condition he made windows in his factory to allow the children air and light. He objected at first, saying that it would prevent their working, but finally consented, and admitted afterwards that the children did more work with the windows than they had done without them.

The factory owners are glad to get the children, for they say children work better than grown-up people at carpet-making, and of course they expect less wages. But how can the parents allow their children to live this cruel life? You will find the answer in the Persian saying that “of every three persons in Kirman, four smoke opium.”... Over and over again comes the terrible story, the father and mother smoke opium; the little deformed child toils through the long days to earn the money that buys it.

Is the picture sad enough, are the colors gloomy enough, are the weary cries loud enough to reach and touch every womanly heart in a Christian land,—every mother or sister or teacher who has ever loved or helped or taught a child? Ah, but we must go into darker depths than these if we are to be even ordinarily intelligent concerning child life and its needs. What of the little slave children who are stolen from their homes “in darkest Africa,” who are sold by their parents in China and Assam, who live lives of unspeakable misery in Korea, in Siam, in Turkey, Morocco, and Arabia? Paid child labor is terrible enough, but the countless slave children of the world live under a far more cruel system.

In his revelations concerning “The Crime of the Congo,” A. Conan Doyle gives proof of the atrocious crimes perpetrated on little children as well as on men and women by employees of the Congo government. The selling, beating, mutilation, and murder of children were proved to be common occurrences.

It is said to be difficult for even the missionaries to realize the awful extent of the traffic in girls in China. In famine times girls may be bought for a mere song, sometimes being peddled about the streets in a basket and sold like poultry. In Siam the problem of slavery has assumed such large proportions that the king issued an edict a few years ago that thereafter all children born of slaves should be free.

“To set at liberty them that are bound” is still the work of Jehovah’s servants, and here and there throughout mission lands will be found Rescue Homes for slave children where new life and hope and opportunity are given to children who have been stolen from their homes or deliberately sold into slavery. The rescued-slave school in Muscat, Arabia, was started by the Rev. Peter Zwemer for some African slave boys caught by Arab traders, who were in turn caught by a British consul whose servant saw the slave-dhow and reported it. The rescued children were turned over to Christian people, most of them being cared for and trained for useful Christian manhood at the Muscat school.

The Spirit of Missions for June, 1905, tells of a woman’s conference held at Shanghai at which one of the subjects chosen for discussion was “Chinese Slave Girls.” A successful effort was made to enlist the co-operation of non-missionary ladies, and the result was the opening of a home for slave children under the direction of a committee on which the missionaries and the foreign residents were represented. After four years they were able to report the presence of fifteen girls, most of them very young and looking even younger than they really were because stunted by harsh treatment and lack of sufficient food. Not a child in the home but had been taken from a life of pain and cruel hardship, and none is too wretched or maimed or low to be received. They are taught to sew, to read and write in their own language, and to know and love Christ who put it into the hearts of His children to save and help them.

If you are tempted to query,—Can a stunted, maimed, degraded slave child ever repay such an outlay of effort and toil and expense?—please read the following extract from a letter from Miss Muir of the Methodist Episcopal Mission in China.

One year ago last spring Dr. B. was called to see a little slave girl in one of China’s most prominent official’s families. She was five years old. She was caught napping when she should have been fanning one of the young ladies of the family. This young lady, sixteen years old, a spoiled pet, struck the child over the head and face, leaving deep scars, tied her hands and feet together, and threw scalding water upon her. When Dr. B. saw her he persuaded them to let her go to the Hospital, where her feet and all fingers except the stump of her right thumb had to be amputated. Then Dr. B. wanted to put her into the school, and so he told this official he would have to settle a certain amount of money on her for life or he (Dr. B.) would expose him to the public and the foreign countries where he had lived. After he had tried in every way to creep out of it, Dr. B. holding fast, $3000.00 was settled upon the child as long as she lives, but whatever has not been spent of it at her death goes back to the family. This is poor little Mary, who is compelled to walk on her knees the rest of her life just because she was too sleepy to keep awake one afternoon when only five years old. But her influence in the school cannot be estimated. Her being there has helped to soften and make more kind and thoughtful every girl from the oldest to the youngest. It is beautiful to watch the little ones try to carry her or pick her up when she falls. It has been the redemption of “Pontsi” (Fattie), who used to be the mischief of the school: she would not study for any teacher, and was the hopeless case of every one. “Pontsi” appointed herself the guardian and caretaker of Mary as soon as Mary came to school; she is Mary’s partner in the line; she wheels Mary in her little chair; helps her up and down from the bench in chapel; and is always alert to do the many little helpful things where Mary needs help. She has become very studious and good in her classes, no more in mischief. But Mary has such a bright, happy disposition that she is a great help to herself, and many a time will beat half a dozen with two good feet running across the compound on her knees.

We started our chapter with children at play; we found that all too soon in countless instances the play must cease and hard grinding work must begin; we learned that in many lands great masses of little children are in hopeless slavery. One other large group of pathetic little ones claims our attention, sympathy, and help in this connection,—children who know little or nothing of play and fun and laughter,—for whom no provision is made in lands where Christ is not known. These are the defective and dependent children,—cripples, deaf mutes, the blind, orphans, famine waifs, children of lepers. Why is it that until missionaries started to work for these classes of children, or governments were inspired to such efforts by the examples of Christian governments, there was no chance or hope for the great mass of defective and dependent children in non-Christian lands? Why is it that blind girls in Korea had no other prospect than that of being sold to be trained as sorceresses, or that parents of blind Chinese girls find a ready market for them in brothels? Search diligently and find out if you can what would have become of the famine waifs of India and China, or the massacre orphans of Turkey, had not Christian missionaries considered their need a call to new and more difficult service, and had not Christians in Europe and America heard and answered the call for more funds to support the new work.

The World Atlas of Christian Missions, published in 1911, gives the statistics for Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands as follows:

The Armenian massacres in 1894–96 cast some fifty thousand children in Turkey without warning onto the care of the missionaries, who had to face the alternative of letting these children die or drift hopelessly into lives of wretchedness and vice, or else of caring for them in some adequate, systematic way. Many pages might be written to show how Christian missions rose to the occasion, but one instance must suffice as an illustration of the task, how it was met, and its consequences. We quote from a letter written in 1912 by Rev. George C. Reynolds, M. D., for forty-four years a missionary in Van, Turkey.

“In 1896 occurred the great massacre, when for a week our premises became the place of refuge for the Armenians, of which from 10,000 to 15,000 availed themselves. And then our streets became filled with helpless orphans, whose plaintive cry for help we tried to voice as an appeal to Christian philanthropy in America and Europe. Thank God, the appeal brought response, and we were enabled to gather in a few of these helpless waifs to feed and shelter and clothe and educate in books and trades. For fifteen years this God-given work was continued, and several temporary buildings were erected for its accommodation. When our German friends withdrew their part of the institution to separate quarters, promising sufficient orphanage provision for the province, the American Orphanage was allowed to pass into history; but we feel as we review this history, that this effort at least was worth while. Nearly a thousand children were rescued from the streets to find a loving Christian home, and the elevation which it gave them over the mass of even well-to-do villagers from among whom most of them were taken might almost make them thankful for the massacre. Forty-five of the five hundred and seventy-five boys have graduated from our high school, thirty-nine of whom have given some years of their lives to teaching. A good number have continued their studies in higher institutions in this country or abroad. Two have secured the degree of M. D. in America, and are engaged in successful practice of their profession there, while others are on their way to the same goal. One has just taken his M. D. degree from Edinburgh University, and another is soon to graduate from London University, while three or four are successfully pursuing university studies at Harvard. Three have graduated from colleges in Turkey. Political and economic conditions in this land not being attractive, many have emigrated, of whom fifty are now in the United States, and two in South America. Most of these are fully making good. This orphanage episode of my life brings me much of joy and satisfaction.”

Seventeen years pass, and the scene changes. Then it was Christian children, helpless and starving because the Mohammedans had killed their parents. Now it is Mohammedan children homeless and suffering because Christian nations have devastated their land by war. Then and now it is the Christian missionary who sees the need and realizes that “it is not the will of our Father that one of these little ones should perish.” “Some of these children are simply irresistible,” writes Professor Arthur Reed Cass of the International College, Smyrna, “The stories they tell are sad indeed. Hundreds of Moslem babies are being born on transport ships and in schools where lessons have been suspended to make room for homeless folk. Here is a chance for American Christianity to prove its recognition of need regardless of lines of race and creed.”[43]

Reports full of thrilling interest come to hand concerning the work of Christian orphanages in non-Christian lands,—institutions founded and maintained by those who consider it their privilege to act as the human agents of Him who is the “Father of the fatherless.” We are told that St. Mary’s Orphanage maintained in Shanghai, China, by the Episcopal Board of Missions has been dubbed by the Chinese, “The Polishing Jade Establishment,” which is a reference to their own classic teaching that as jade must be cut and polished to be of value, so children must be taught and trained.

The plan of establishment of orphanages in India under the Methodist Episcopal Mission dates back to 1857, and is a fine example of how Christian missionaries are on the lookout for suitable openings for work, and how to them is apt to be granted the far vision that labors for the present and future generations and for eternity.

The orphanage for girls was first established in the city of Lucknow, but up to the close of 1860 only thirteen orphans had been received. Owing to the famine that spread over the land after the great mutiny, it became an easy matter to secure girls, and the following year the number increased to forty-one.... At the close of the mutiny, Dr. Butler made application to the government for a number of girls to be placed in the orphanage, to be cared for by the mission. The government was very willing that the children should be thus provided for.... Dr. Butler says:

“Upon reaching the city we found that the Mohammedan officers connected with the magistrate’s court, at whose disposal the girls had been placed, had distributed many of them in houses of infamy throughout the city to be brought up to a life of sin. This matter was presented to the governor, and the children were ordered to be immediately recovered and forwarded to the mission. They were sent in large carts, each containing twenty girls. The oldest was probably twelve or thirteen years, the youngest a mere babe; but three-fourths of them were under eleven years of age. Each driver had his list for his load. He lifted out the largest one first and laid her down, then the rest, placing them around her as if building them into a bee-hive shape. Then the heaps were counted and the signature affixed to each list, and the carts moved out.

“The children were all untidy, and their countenances bore the traces of the hunger through which they had passed.... But these were girls, and the glad thought was that they were our own to save and train and elevate. We accepted them as a trust from God. All hands were soon at work in loving labor to change the aspect of things. The missionary women and their native helpers before the sun went down had accomplished a delightful transformation. Bodies were washed, clean clothing put on, and a hearty meal of wholesome food banished the gloomy looks and brought forth the first smiles on those little faces.”[44]

Not only are orphanages established, but missionaries use many other means to provide for helpless, dependent, or neglected children who are thrown on their care. After one of India’s great famines the Rev. Rockwell Clancy of Allahabad formed a distributing station for famine waifs and collected and placed hundreds of them in various schools and institutions throughout the land. A new missionary to China after only a month’s study of the language had rather an interesting trip with his collection of famine orphans. He writes:—

“The trip to Nanking, including a ten-mile trip on the Presbyterian motor boat to the railroad station and the one hundred miles by rail, was full of wonders to these little country lads. On the cars when eating our slim lunch, consisting of a bun and a boiled egg for each boy, one of the boys who was a little older than most of them politely offered part of his share to the people who were occupying the same seat with him, and this in spite of the fact that he had been going hungry for weeks or months.

“After entering the city wall at Nanking we drove the seven miles to a rented Chinese house where I was living, which was to serve as their home for the time being. One of the drivers told the boys that we were going to dig out their eyes and cut out their stomachs. This awesome news, coupled with a little homesickness, was probably the cause of two of them running away the very next day. We had to send four or five to the Methodist hospital to be treated, and two of the older boys who were allowed to go along ran away. But their places have been filled by three others, two of whom I had to leave in the hospital at Hwai Yuan.”[45]

What provision is there for the blind, the deaf and dumb, the crippled children in non-Christian lands? Would you care to know the number of children whose fate is like that of the Mohammedan girl who was brought by her grandmother to the missionary dispensary in Persia? She was deaf, dumb, and blind, and her grandmother pleaded with the lady physician to do something to cure her. The girl shrank in fright as a strange hand touched her and then every tense muscle in her body showed amazement and relief when the hand proved to be gentle and loving. Again the grandmother brought her, saying, “You must find a remedy. There is nothing we can do with her. Must I kill her?” and the missionary’s heart was broken because she could not cure and there was absolutely no institution to which to take the girl. Some years later a younger deaf and dumb girl was brought to the dispensary by a woman whose face seemed familiar and who turned out to be the despairing old grandmother. “Where is the older girl?” asked the doctor. “Oh,” exclaimed the old woman, while the tears rained down her face, “I had to kill her. There was nothing else to do!”

Who knows what there was behind that wall of blindness and deafness,—who knows what might have been the result had the Mohammedan Helen Keller had her fair chance? Which members of the “organized motherhood for the children of the world” will see to it that there are means and workers enough to give these children their inalienable rights? The work is barely begun, but is full of promise.

“According to the last census, the number of blind persons in the Indian Empire is 600,000. Little was done for them until Miss Asquith, superintendent of the school for Tamil girls in Palamcotta, founded a school for blind children a few years ago. Her success was so great that she resigned her lucrative position and gave herself and all her time to the care of the blind. Now the English Government will aid her in the erection of two substantial school buildings, one for boys, the other for girls, that she may give both a more complete education.”[46]

“The Martha A. King Memorial School for the Deaf has been started as a department of the work of the Woman’s Board of Missions at Marsovan. The oral method is used, and it is the intention to teach each pupil the language of his own home. The present year the Greek department has been opened, an Armenian department will be opened in September, 1911, and one in Turkish as soon as there is a demand for it.

“Children (both boys and girls) will be received at from six to eight years of age. Older children may be accepted, but it is important for the attainment of the best results that pupils begin the work within the age limits named. Miss Philadelpheus, the teacher, has spent two years at the Clark School for the Deaf, Northampton, Mass., in preparation for this work. Both the home and school life of the children are under the most careful supervision.”[47]

One in every five hundred of China’s vast population is estimated to be deaf and dumb. The only school in China for such unfortunates is in Chefoo and was started in 1898 as an independent work by Mrs. A. T. Mills, for many years a member of the Presbyterian Mission, which heartily approves of the school, but has no funds with which to support it. Boys and girls are taught in this school to read, write, and speak, and are given as much elementary knowledge as is possible, while being trained to useful occupations by which they may hope to be self-supporting. Such constructive work for children who are handicapped is considered absolutely necessary in America and Europe. Is there in your opinion any necessity for multiplying such agencies in non-Christian lands?

Does it pay to help in Christ’s name even one of these little ones? Are they worth helping? Which one of us could do the work of the blind reader of Amritsar in India?

“A peculiarly bright, happy-looking girl of about eighteen, sitting down at the beginning of the morning in one of our Amritsar dispensaries, with her large Gospel of St. Matthew, in Dr. Moon’s system of raised characters for the blind, open on her knees; she can see nothing, but her fingers move swiftly across the page, and she begins to read better than some persons who have the use of their eyes! As the morning goes on, all the sick who come for medicine will listen with astonishment and pleasure, and she will have opportunities of witnessing for Jesus to those who ask her a reason for the hope that is in her. She was once herself in the darkness of Mohammedanism, and in the Blind School found Christ. She is now a rejoicing and consistent Christian. Do you think that, as we stood and watched her delight in reading the comfortable words of our Saviour Christ, we asked ourselves if to bring such to the Lord were work worth doing? Rather, is it not a service which angels might envy?”[48]

A leprous mother, outcast of society, doomed to spend the rest of her life in a leper village and to drag out a miserable existence among those who are afflicted and suffering like herself! What, oh what, shall she do with her children, as yet untainted by the frightful disease, but sure to develop it if they too go to the leper village? And yet who is there in the wide world to care for her little ones? Her husband is up at the village, hands gone, sightless eyes, disfigured face,—he cannot help. No relatives or neighbors will be bothered with the children of the outcast, and yet that mother heart beats with an intense, despairing mother love as yours or mine might,—with a love that can bear all suffering and even slow death for herself if only her children are safe. Hark, a neighbor calls to her from a safe distance,—“Do you know that those foreign Jesus people have a place where they take the children of those who are accursed of God like yourself? They take them and feed them and teach them their Jesus religion and train them to earn their living.” Oh, it is the one word of hope and courage, the one ray of light in utter darkness, and the little children are left on the threshold of the Home for Untainted Children, and the leper mother learns of a Home where she herself may go and where she and her husband may receive loving care and unheard-of comfort, and where the years of suffering are illumined by the knowledge of another Home where she may meet her darlings once more, and “where the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick.”

“Twenty-one Homes for the untainted children of leprous parents in which about five hundred boys and girls are being brought up to healthy and useful lives and saved from adding to the terrible total of diseased outcasts,”[49] this is the record of the work of Christian missions thus far. Compare with it the record of what in this modern day has been done in the name of an attempt at civilization which leaves Christianity entirely out of account.

“Wellesley G. Bailey of Edinburgh, the superintendent of the Mission to Lepers, has received authoritative information concerning the terrible massacre of lepers by government soldiers which was perpetrated at the city of Nanning, the remote capital of the province Kwang-si in southern China. The massacre was instituted under the direct orders of the governor general of the province.... In this case the offense of his cruelty is aggravated by the fact that, taking advantage of the trend to modern ideas in China, the vicious old general pretended to be acting in the interest of scientific hygiene. The excuse he has made for the massacre is that leprosy is a great menace to humanity and the destruction of those afflicted with it is the surest way of stamping out the scourge....

“The English Missionaries had been anxious for some time to build a leper hospital, but could not spare the energy for it from their other work. And for a long time the Catholics seemed entirely indifferent to the needs of lepers. But finally, there arrived in the latter mission a very earnest and sympathetic priest, whose attention was early attracted to the collection of miserable hovels outside the city, where the community of suffering had drawn together a larger group of outcast lepers. The priest determined that something must be done for them....

“But it appears that the intrusion of the French into the matter angered General Luk so much that he took measures immediately to dispose of the question in another way. Soldiers were sent out to dig a deep trench near by the leper village, and early on a Saturday morning soon after a large body of troops completely surrounded the lepers’ wretched huts. Shouts brought them out of the door of their hovels, and immediately the soldiers opened fire, shooting relentlessly until the whole community—men, women and children—were dead or helplessly wounded. Then the whole mass, many still living, were dropped into the trench, kerosene poured over them and the pile set alight. The victims at this one point numbered fifty-three. Of course there was immense excitement in the city, and to defend himself the governor general issued a proclamation urging that all lepers should be put out of the way, and advising that those who did not voluntarily kill themselves should be killed by their friends and relatives. How many more died in this way is not known.

“Many crimes have been committed in the name of civilization, as of liberty, but perhaps never one quite so monstrous as this in the name of ‘hygiene.’ Certainly the incident illustrates how keenly China needs not civilization simply, but civilization based upon Christian religion.”[50]

“The child in the midst,” playful, trustful, loving, helpless, exalted by our Saviour into a type to be admired and copied if one would enter into the Kingdom of Heaven! The Master placed him in the very midst of His disciples, where he might find shelter, protection, and love. But today we find the little ones, thousands, millions of them, in the midst of suffering, neglect, vice, crime, torture, despair, danger to body and soul. And ever and anon the Master’s voice echoes in our ears, “Whosoever shall receive one such little one in My name, receiveth Me.”