feed other people's children
should be cast out. In the war time the wealthy bachelor and the
spinster of advancing years took it for granted that other people's
children should fight for them. The obligation must apply both ways.

No society is properly organized until every child that is born into it
shall have an opportunity in life. Success in life and capacity to live
we cannot give. But opportunity we can. We can at least see that the
gifts that are laid in the child's cradle by nature are not obliterated
by the cruel fortune of the accident of birth: that its brain and body
are not stunted by lack of food and air and by the heavy burden of
premature toil. The playtime of childhood should be held sacred by the
nation.

This, as I see it, should be the first and the greatest effort of social
reform. For the adult generation of to-day many things are no longer
possible. The time has passed. We are, as viewed with a comprehensive
eye, a damaged race. Few of us in mind or body are what we might be; and
millions of us, the vast majority of industrial mankind known as the
working class, are distorted beyond repair from what they might have
been. In older societies this was taken for granted: the poor and the
humble and the lowly reproduced from generation to generation, as they
grew to adult life, the starved brains and stunted outlook of their
forbears,--starved and stunted only by lack of opportunity. For nature
knows of no such differences in original capacity between the children
of the fortunate and the unfortunate. Yet on this inequality, made by
circumstance, was based the whole system of caste, the stratification
of the gentle and the simple on which society rested. In the past it may
have been necessary. It is not so now. If, with all our vast apparatus
of machinery and power, we cannot so arrange society that each child has
an opportunity in life, it would be better to break the machinery in
pieces and return to the woods from which we came.

Put into the plainest of prose, then, we are saying that the government
of every country ought to supply work and pay for the unemployed,
maintenance for the infirm and aged, and education and opportunity for
the children. These are vast tasks. And they involve, of course, a
financial burden not dreamed of before the war. But here again the war
has taught us many things. It would have seemed inconceivable before,
that a man of great wealth should give one-half of his i