e word "Unclean."

=The heart of the problem.=--Here we arrive at the very heart of the
problem that confronts the home and the school. We may close our eyes,
or look another way, but the problem remains. We may not be able to
solve it, but we cannot evade it. Each day it calls loudly to every
parent and every teacher for a solution. The health and happiness of the
coming generations depend upon the right education of the present one,
and this responsibility the home and the school can neither shirk nor
shift. We take great unction to ourselves for the excellence of the
horses, pigs, and cattle that we have on exhibition at the fairs, but
are silent as to our failures in the form of children, that drag out a
half-life in our hospitals. In one state it costs more to care for the
defectives and unfortunates than to provide schooling facilities for all
the normal children, but this fact is not written into party platforms
nor proclaimed from the stump. In the face of such a fact society seems
to proceed upon the agreeable assumption that the less said the better.

=Misconceptions.=--We temporize with the fundamental situation by the
use of such soporifics as the expressions "necessary evil" and the like,
but that leaves us exactly at the starting point. Many well-meaning
people use these expressions with great frequency and freedom and seem
to think that in so doing they have given a proof of virtue and public
spirit. It were worthy only of an iconoclast to deprecate or disparage
the legislative attempts to foster clean living. All such efforts are
worthy of commendation; but in sadness it must be confessed that,
laudable as these efforts are, they have not produced results that are
wholly satisfactory. Defectives are still granted licenses to perpetuate
their kind; children still enervate their bodies and minds by the use of
narcotics; and society daintily lifts its skirts as it hurries past the
evil, pretending not to see. Legislation is an attempt to express public
sentiment in statutory form; but public sentiment must precede
legislation if it is to become effective. Efforts have been made through
the process of legislation to deny the granting of marriage licenses to
people who are physically unsound, but the efforts came to naught
because public sentiment has not attained to this plane of thinking.
Hence, we shall not have much help from legislation in solving our
problem, until public sentiment has been educated.