the war days,
and the primary purpose seems to be to penalize "the over-rewarded and
greedy toilers" of the war-days, selfishly bent upon extorting all the
standards of decent living out of industry.

Cutting short this disgression, the direst poverty seems unable to
avert the wonder of parents somehow rearing their children to all the
graces of noble and selfless living. But, I repeat, this is a largesse
to society on the part of its disinherited, whose high revenge takes
the form of giving their best to the highest. We may, however, make
certain demands upon the privileged who reward themselves with leisure
and all its pleasing tokens and symbols. For these at least have the
external materials of home-building. Need I make clear that the homes
of too much are as gravely imperilled as the homes of too little?

Many homes survive the lack of things. Many more languish and perish
because of the superabundance to stifling of things, things, things.
The very rich are ever in peril of losing what once were their homes,
a tragedy almost deeper than that of the many poor who have no home to
lose. The law takes cognizance in most one-sided fashion of the fact
that a home may endure without moral foundations but that it cannot
exist without material bases. Despite attempts on the part of the
State or States to avert the breaking up of a home solely because of
the poverty of the widowed mother, it still is true that many homes
are broken up on the ground of poverty and on no other ground. Saddest
of all, mothers take it for granted that such break-up is unavoidable.

Only two reasons justify the State's withdrawal of a child from its
parental roof,--incurable physical and mental disability in a child,
whose parents are unable to give it adequate care, or moral disability
on the part of parents. If the latter ground be valid, material
circumstances ought no more to hold parent and child together than the
absence of them ought to drive parent and child apart. A child
resident on Fifth Avenue in New York may be in greater moral peril
than a little waif of Five Points. Societies for the prevention of
cruelty to children ought to intervene as readily when moral leprosy
notoriously pervades the home of the rich as the State intervenes when
children's health is neglected or their moral well-being endangered in
a home of poverty. I have sometimes thought that an orphan asylum
ought to be erected for the benefit of the worse than orpha