A Little Child Shall Lead Them on AllMovie

This drama was plugged as a grand paean to motherhood, but judging from the plot, it seems more focused on promoting adoption which, in any case, was a noble cause. Betty Lewis (Peggy Shaw) is in love with Bob Hale (Robert Agnew), but her father, the formidable Colonel Lewis (the formidable L. Rogers Lytton) disapproves of the match. Betty marries Hale secretly, but he is killed and when Betty's baby is born, the Colonel takes it away and tells her it died. Later Betty marries another man, Ken Tyler (Niles Welch), but her father insists that she keep her past a secret. When Betty finds her child in an orphanage the truth comes out. Tyler denounces her, but he finds out that he, too, was an orphan and he begs her forgiveness. Director J. Searle Dawley used a group of overly precocious children to play the orphans at the asylum -- according to critics of the day, some of them acted as if they were three going on thirty!