To the mother of generations and the weaver of nations, to my sister, woman, I address this appeal of mine! And my appeal is but an echo of the appeal of the deprived child, a reverberation of his feeble voice; nay, it is the expression of what stirs the heart of a mother who has seen with her own eyes childhood in torment, and so has come to beg your aid, and who has seen with her mind's eye the dark future that awaits these innocent children, and so has come to call on you for rescue!

And who has a better claim than the mother to answer the child's call? And who more deserves that instinctive tenderness and overflowing affection with which a woman's heart brims at the word "child" than a child whom cruel fate has denied the blessings of tenderness, affection, and care?

These neglected, dirty children, running loose in the open street with bare feet and worn-out rags, are the sons of the nation; they are our sons, and we are their mothers even if we did not bear them. They are time's deposit in our trust and the future's charge upon our necks; they are stones in the building of this dear homeland — but rough stones that need polishing, and irregular stones that need to be made even.

We are building a nation, and the nation in which poverty, ignorance, and disease hide behind the balconies is building only for a short term, because it rears in its bosom the crimes of vagrancy, beggary, and criminality, which return to society as deadly elements and as pickaxes of demolition against the building.

The evil, the whole evil, is that we should shut our eyes to these crimes gnawing at the body of our new generation,