to be not socially thrifty to
thus place a double burden upon mothers. The death-rate and
sickness-rate of families in which the children do not have sufficient
nourishing food, in which the mother is half starved and wholly
deprived of rest and pleasure, and the father is under terror night
and day lest the rent money will not be ready when the landlord's
agent comes, cannot give us ease of mind. The families in which
unemployment is frequent or overwork keeps the father as well as the
mother under the pressure of nervous exhaustion, are the families in
which the right of the child to two competent parents is grossly
denied. The aid given the mother, by even the best of "Maternity
Bills," insofar as it transcends the wider dissemination of knowledge
and gives actual financial aid in economic distress, seems only a
makeshift. The sick have a social claim for social care and the
ignorant of all ages have a special claim upon the community for
instruction, whether from separate Commonwealth or from the Federal
Government, it matters little. The financial aid given, however, the
"material relief" that must be rendered in family emergencies, should
not be needed by the healthy, law-abiding, thrifty, honest, skilled,
or even half-skilled workman. He should be able to earn a necessary
minimum for himself and for his family by his own labors. We cannot
here enter into the economic problems involved, but must register a
conviction that real social progress must include not only a competent
father for every child but also a fairer chance for every man to
become that competent father through fairer sharing in the profits of
industry. Widespread and careful inquiry as to reasons for dropping
below the self-supporting line list as one cause of "necessity for
material relief, having in the family more than three children under
the age of fourteen." This fact must give us thought. At fourteen in
many states the child may begin to earn something toward his own
support. The question may well be debated whether or not an average
man in ordinary economic general conditions should be unable to care
for more than three children below the earning period if his wife is a
competent housemother and thus earns her part. If such a condition of
restriction upon family increase is accepted as inevitable and
permanent in our industrial order, then surely the cost of rearing
children must be far more widely distributed. In such a condition
there wo