ned
children of some notoriously corrupt, even when not multi-divorced,
heads of society. Such a protectory for the unorphaned, though not
fatherless and motherless, might serve a more useful purpose than do
such orphanages as, having captured a child, yield it up reluctantly
even to the care of a normal home.

CHAPTER II

BACK OF ALL CONFLICTS

It may seem to be going rather far back, to be dealing with the
problem _ab ovo et ab initio_, to hold as I do that much of the
clashing that takes place between the two generations in the home is
the outcome of an instinctive protest against the unfitness of the
elders to have become parents. It is far more important to speak to
parents of their duty to the unborn than to dwell on filial piety
touching parents living or dead. Children have the right to ask of
parents that they be well-born. Such children as are cursed and doomed
to be born may not only curse the day that they were born but them
that are answerable for the emergence from darkness to darkness.

Even if we did not insist upon dealing with fundamentals, children
would, and they will, question the right of unfit parents to have
begotten them. A new science has arisen to command parents not only
"to honor thy son and thy daughter" but so to honor life in all its
sanctity and divineness as to leave a child unborn,--if they be unfit
for the office of parenthood. Honor thy father and thy mother living
or dead is good; but not less good is it to honor thy son and
daughter, born and unborn. Some day the State,--you and I,--will step
in and enforce this command and will visit its severest condemnation
and even penalty upon parents, not because a child has been born to
them illegitimately in a legal or technical sense, but because in a
very real and terrible sense they have been guilty of mothering and
fathering a child into life which is not wholly viable--that is
unendowered with complete opportunity for normal living.

Some day we shall surround marriage and child-bearing with every
manner of safeguard and ultimately the major findings of eugenics will
be embodied into law and statute. The duty of parents to a child born
to them is high, but highest of all at times may be the duty of
leaving children unborn. Race suicide is bad, but an unguided and
unlimited philoprogenitiveness may be worse. About a decade ago, it
was considered radical on the part of certain representatives of the
church to announce that