expense of
raising the coming generation then there must surely be no special
honor paid to those that have very large families. Better, for social
purposes, that no children above a reasonable number should in any
family receive a special allowance, even if older brothers and sisters
did do so. It may be that in France large families are desperately
needed. Not so in the United States. The number of five or six should
certainly be the limit for which any just scheme of family subsidy
should mulct the taxpayer.

=Just Limits to Number of Children in Subsidized Families.=--The
difference between the three under fourteen years which in so many
cases can be cared for unassisted by the average workman, and the four
and more that bring the family down to the danger-point of financial
dependence, might be a subject for consideration in any scheme of
family subsidy, and some clear idea of social need in family fertility
should be a part of any proposition to make allowance from the public
funds for each child under the earning age. In any case, the father's
share in the self-sacrifice and burden of parenthood should have some
clear recognition in any law dealing with such state aid. In the last
analysis, unless some extreme form of socialism is better than the
present industrial order and to be sought, the best way to help the
family is to make fathers and mothers competent to take care of their
own children without too great effort for themselves and without
injurious consequences to the children. Those Trade Union leaders may
be right in principle when they hesitate to accept any public family
aid scheme lest it make wages less rather than more and bring on a
condition in which heroic struggle for one's own, the very pith and
marrow of manhood in its relation to the family, be less esteemed and
less practiced.

We are confronted, however, both in the movements for aid to maternity
in care before and after childbirth, and in all the many provisions
for child-saving that publicly supported Boards of Health are
everywhere inaugurating, with a tendency of the greatest strength and
social appeal, tendencies toward a sharing by all of the burdens
heretofore borne only by the heads of families. Some way must be
devised by which such sharing will not cheat society of any gains to
character and to sense of family responsibility which old systems of
economic support of children have given the race. Some way must be
devised to reco