What did it mean? It meant this, and nothing less, that these children had come at last to their rights; that every baby is entitled to one pair of mother’s arms around its neck; that its God-given right is a home,—a _home_; and that, when man robs it of that right, it will not stay. And small blame to it! It shows that even foundling babies have good sense. They stayed, these, in such numbers—their death rate fell below the ordinary death rate of all the children of their age—because they were _picked_ homes they were put into. It meant, friends, that God puts a little child in a home because He wants it to grow up with that as its most precious heritage, its spark of heaven that ever beckons it to its true home beyond. It means that you cannot herd human beings in battalions and expect them to develop the qualities of individuality, of character, that make citizenship upon which to build the Republic that shall be the hope of to-morrow as well as the shelter of to-day. We tried that with the “communities” that wiped out the family and substituted the barrack for the home. But happily they wiped out themselves. No, brethren, upon the home rests our moral character; our civic and political liberties are grounded there; virtue, manhood, citizenship grow there. We forget it to our peril. For American citizenship in the long run, will be, _must be_, what the American home is.
And this home, how does it look to me? The ideal, always in my mind, is that of a man with his feet upon the soil and his children growing up there. So, it seems to me, we should have responsible citizenship by the surest road. But that ideal is unattainable in our cities. We must find another there. And I ask, as the minimum standard, less than which I will not take, isolation enough in the teeming crowds to secure the privacy without which individuality cannot grow and character is fearfully handicapped. I ask light and air, at least as plentiful and as good as they have it in the great cattle barns I have seen in my own old home, where their cows are their most precious possession, because through them the people make their living. I ask an environment in which a man may think himself a respectable citizen, an environment that has no suggestion of the pigsty. You have no business to try to persuade an American citizen that that is his place. It is treason against the republic. I ask, above all, the mother who makes the home; I want the mother. Without her, home is but an empty name.