o undertake
this individual work. Moreover, correcting a child for personal habits
can hardly be effective before fifty or sixty pairs of critical eyes.

The office of the home must be to teach habits of right living and
daily action, and a joy and pride in life as well as responsibility
for life. It is not fair that the parents should sit back and shift to
the school the whole responsibility for the future citizen.

The little modifications can best be made in the home, permanent
foundations can be laid and braced with habits so good and strong that
nothing can shake them. Most powers are the result of habits. Let the
furrows be plowed deeply enough while the brain cells are plastic,
then human energies will result in efficiency and the line of least
resistance will be the right line. Everything, therefore, which
influences the child must be the best known to science. The houses of
the land must be regulated by the scientific laws of right living. To
the woman, the home worker, we say: "You must have the will power,
for the sake of your child, to bring to his service all that has been
discovered for the promotion of human efficiency, so that he may have
the habit, the _technique_."

To pay a tax today for the benefit of one's children is a principle of
insurance, of benefit association. This feeling of obligation means
present sacrifice of ease and inclination, and it has been
increasingly shirked, so that it is not surprising that a tax to
insure one against future loss by disease is an unwelcome proposition.

The whole question of the child in the home is one of ethics, as the
writers on social conditions have been trying to convince the world.
If the swarms of dwellers in the busy hives of industry have no sense
of their humanity, if they do not use the human power of looking
ahead, that power which differentiates man from animals, what better
are they than animals?

No one can be sorry that there are no children in thousands of homes
one knows. It is better that children should not have been born than
to come into an inheritance of suffering and mental and moral
dwarfing. Social uplift will not be possible while parents take the
view of cats, or even of a well-to-do mother who said, "I did not have
my baby to discipline her; I had her to play with."

No state can thrive while its citizens waste their resources of
health, bodily energy, time, and brain power, any more than a nation
may prosper which wastes it