and which cannot be given them under the prevailing
system. It is only when a woman is free to choose the father of her
child that the child can hope for even a partial payment of the debt
that was due it from its parents from the moment they took the
responsibility of calling it from the nowhere into the here. This
doctrine of the responsibility of the parent to the child is
comparatively new and goes neither with marriage nor with the home. The
old and current notion is that the child is a chattel.

Abraham never offers an apology for making little Isaac carry wood and
then mount the sacrificial pile. Indeed we are asked to marvel at the
heroism of the father. Then we are told that God so loved the world that
he gave his only begotten son. As if the child were the property of the
parent. And yet there must always have been naughty children asking
pointed questions, for it was long ago found necessary to try to scare
them by a divine fulmination. Honor thy father and thy mother that thy
days may be long! It seems that even so long ago parents were afraid
they could not win honor from their children. Abraham's place was on the
pile, just as it is the place of the modern parent who looks upon his
child as his chattel; disposing of him as he will; arbitrarily making
rules for his conduct which he would not dream of observing for himself;
stifling his natural demands for knowledge; converting what is pure and
most beautiful in the world into a mire of filth and ignorance; wilfully
robbing him of his birthright of individuality by forcing him to conform
to methods of thought and conduct which his own experience tells him no
man can or does conform to from the moment he wins his freedom or learns
the hideous lesson of that hypocrisy which he is sure in the end to
discover that his father practices. What right has any father to make a
sacrifice of his child? What is his title to the love or gratitude or
self-abnegation of his child? Is it that the child is the unconsidered
consequence of the legal rape of some poor woman who has been unfitted
for the office forced upon her, by a life mentally dwarfed, morally
twisted and physically mutilated? Is it that the child is haled out of
nothingness to be inoculated, perhaps, with germs of disease in the
first instance and then half nourished for nine months in a body which
has been robbed of its vitality by the mutilation and torture to which
it has been subjected at the behest of fas