themselves simply as an
atrocious failure of statesmanship. Indeed, a social system in which
the mass of the population is growing up under these conditions, he
scarcely recognizes as a State, rather it seems to him a mere
preliminary higgledy-piggledy aggregation of human beings, out of
which a State has to be made. It seems to him that this wretched
confusion of affairs which repeats itself throughout the country
wherever population has gathered, must be due to more than individual
inadequacy; it must be due to some general and essential failure, some
unsoundness in the broad principles upon which the whole organization
is conducted.

What is this general principle of failure beneath all these particular
cases?

In any given instance this or that reason for the failure of a child
may be given. In one case it may be the father or mother drinks, in
another that the child is an orphan, neglected by aunt or stepmother,
in another that the mother is an invalid or a sweated worker too
overwrought to do much for him, or, though a good-hearted soul, she is
careless and dirty or ignorant, or that she is immoral and reckless,
and so on and so on. Our haphazard sample of ten Scotch cases gives
instances of nearly all these alternatives. And from these proximate
causes one might work back to more general ones, to the necessity of
controlling the drink traffic, of abolishing sweating, of shortening
women's hours of labour, of suppressing vice. But for the present
argument it is not necessary to follow up these special causes. We can
make a wider generalization. For our present analysis it is sufficient
to say that one more general maladjustment covers every case of
neglected or ill-brought-up children in the world, and that is this,
that with or without a decent excuse, the parent has not been equal to
the task of rearing a civilized citizen. We have demanded too much
from the parent, materially and morally, and the ten cases we have
quoted are just ten out of ten millions of the replies to that demand.
Of fifty-two children born, fourteen are dead; and of the remainder we
can hardly regard more than thirteen as being tolerably reared.

Is it not obvious then that, unless we are content that things should
remain as they are, we must put the relations of parent to child on
some securer and more wholesome footing than they are at the present
time? We demand too much from the parent, and this being recognized,
clearly there are o