s of society in general, if anything can be so called. The
children must be saved if the nation is to prosper. It used to be
thought that a high birth-rate was a sufficient indication of national
well-being. It is now seen that a low death-rate and a high level of
strength and vitality, of health and mental power, are still more the
required national asset.

As Dr. Helen D. Putnam well says, "Democracy must finally depend on
its department of education for establishing the right: for mothers,
intelligence, health, economic opportunity to care for their babies;
for babies, either rich or poor, intelligent, physically competent
caretakers," If this be true, then the work of Health Boards and
kindred agencies is a part of general education as it has long been a
part of accepted charitable duty. The children stand first in line for
receipt of that health education because they are the promise of the
future.

We must take humane care of all the misfits, all the crippled, all the
weak, all the defective, all the abnormal and the insane. This is now
admitted. We must prevent, so far as we are able, such weight and
burden falling upon our children and our children's children, as
charity now presses upon us. In this matter, at least, "we must begin
with the grandfathers if we would reform the world."

=The Educational Rights of All Children.=--The right of every child to
a minimum of education, which was our eighth point, is also conceded,
and the duty of making public provision in tax-supported schools for
these essentials of reading, writing, fair knowledge of arithmetic and
the rest, is acknowledged. The idea, however, that some people have
that all the children in the United States have an elementary
schooling is erroneous. This is not a treatise on education, and
elsewhere the statistics of length of schooling per year for the
different parts of the country and of dearth of school seats in cities
and famine of teachers everywhere must be considered. From the side of
the family, however, the claim must be made that equal rights in some
accepted minimum of school training, and that determined in quantity
and quality of teaching by those who know what education means, should
be the demand of all fathers and mothers. In the older time young men
going through college on the way to one of the three learned
professions then listed, law, theology, and medicine, taught often in
the country school to earn an honest penny. Such tea