hers, even
with the best will in the world, unassisted, to place their children in
proper conditions for their up-bringing. At present, with no authorized
person to supervise the mother and check her absolute control, to see
how she spends the alimony, where she places the child, what education
it has, what prospects of growing into an effective adult; too often the
child never reaches maturity and its case is often worse if it does
survive; its home changed from one place to another, sometimes with the
mother, sometimes boarded out with irresponsible people, or adopted with
a premium, it is liable to gross neglect and the most far-reaching and
incurable perversions of character.

We have reached this truth then. _The urgent duty that rests with the
law and with us all is the duty of taking action to prevent as far as it
is possible, and in every way that we can, the penalty of its
illegitimate birth being paid by the child._

VII

Now, this is not going to be done as easily as it may seem; and before
it can be done, in my opinion, we shall have to clear our minds from a
serious error, to which we cling with feminist tentacles in order to
indulge the sentiment so passionately clung to by women-reformers of the
mother's right to her child.

You will have noted how strongly I have insisted on illegitimacy being
the sin of the parents--of the mother even more than of the father--and
have refused to use the word in connection with the child. I have done
this, as must already be plain, for a clear reason. I wished to mark the
separation of the child from its parents' sin. I did not do it from a
perverse refusal to accept what is usually accepted. Clearly it is
absurd to brand the child "illegitimate," since it can never be the
fault of any child that its parents brought it into the world. Let us
talk, if you like, of illegitimate mothers, also of illegitimate
fathers, but never again of the illegitimate child. The penalty of the
parents' sin must not be paid by the child. I cannot emphasize this too
often or too strongly.

The child must be saved by special protection.

Now, it seems to be taken for granted by all modern reformers that the
best way to do this and to serve the interests of the child is to make
even closer than it is at present the connection of the mother and the
child, keeping them more certainly together, except in the few cases
when such a course is clearly absolutely impossible, and _under all
c