Le 14 août 1924, Eglantyne Jebb obtient la permission exceptionnelle de prononcer un sermon sur la Déclaration de Genève à la cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Genève, un privilège rare pour une femme à l’époque. Intitulé « The Claims of the Children », ce sermon représente un accomplissement personnel majeur pour Eglantyne, qui s’adresse alors à une audience de 500 personnes. Nous reproduisons ici le texte en anglais du sermon, extrait de Mahood Linda, Feminism and Voluntary Action : Eglantyne Jebb and Save the Children, 1876-1928, Basingstoke, 2009, p.200.

“Children of God...neglected, exploited, starved, persecuted, tortured, their innocent minds have been poisoned and their white souls dragged through the vilest mud [...] Look across the world and see the suffering of the children. Think of the handicapped children in many lands who are born with tendencies to hereditary disease, who are brought up in overcrowded and insanity hovels...Think of the children with rickets and tuberculosis. Think of the wastrels who will never do a good day’s work; the cripples who will never know the normal joys of life; the feeble-minded children, born perhaps into a sub-human existence...Think of the children in alien countries who are denied hospital treatment or schooling. Think of little girls in China, the binding of whose tender feet causes them years of pain...Think of the child marriages of the East, and their terrible consequences, both to the victims and to their offspring. Think of the child slavery, which still exists... Think of the children in certain parts of America who...are subjected to such heavy toil...Think of what happens in England [where children]...are thrown on to the labour markets, without a dog’s chance of a decent existence... We excuse ourselves by saying we have not money enough to save the children. But so long as the world had money enough for cigarettes and cinema and numbers of little pleasure and comforts, it has money enough for the saving of child life...Think of the refugee children in Greece...Think of the orphans of Armenia. Finally, let us think of the children throughout the world who have been degraded and brutalized by their suffering, the children who are cruel to animals, cruel to each other, and who. before the fears of childhood are passed, are already old in vice.”