Of Children (1912)

This is the Children’s Number, and as it has grown and developed in the editor’s hesitating hands, it has in some way come to seem a typical rather than a special number. Indeed, there is a sense in which all numbers and all words of a magazine of ideas must point to the child—to that vast immortality and wide sweep and infinite possibility which the child represents. Such thought as this it was that made men say of old as they saw baby faces like these that adorn our pages this month:

And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones… it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.

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Citation: Du Bois, W.E.B. 1912. “Of Children.” The Crisis. 4(6):287.