It is evident that real economic equality between men and women must be impossible, if the women are to leave their work for long periods of time, in order to bear and rear children. It is normally impossible for a woman to earn her living by competitive labor, at the same time that she is bearing and rearing children. Either the doctrine of economic equality is largely illusory, therefore, or else it must be extended to making motherhood a salaried occupation just as much as mill work or stenography. The feminists have almost universally adopted the latter alternative. They say that the woman who is capable of earning money, and who abandons wage-earning for motherhood, ought to receive from the state as nearly as possible what she would have received if she had not had children; or else they declare that the expense of children should be borne wholly by the community. This proposal must be tested by asking whether it would tend to strengthen and perpetuate the race or not. It is, in effect, a proposal to have the state pay so much a head for babies. The fundamental question is whether or not the quality of the babies would be taken into account. Doubtless the babies of obviously feeble-minded women would be excluded, but would it be possible for the state to pay liberally for babies who would grow up to be productive citizens, and to refuse to pay for babies that would doubtless grow up to be incompetents, dolts, dullards, laggards or wasters? The scheme would work, eugenically, in proportion as it is discriminatory and graded. But the example of legislation in France and England, and the main trend of popular thought in America, make it quite certain that at present, and for many years to come, it will be impossible to have babies valued on the basis of quality rather than mere numbers. It is sometimes possible to get indirect measures of a eugenic nature passed, and it has been found possible to secure the passage of direct measures which prevent reproduction of those who are actually defective. But even the most optimistic eugenist must feel that, short of the remote future, any attempt to have the state grade and pay for babies on the basis of their quality is certain to fail to pass. The recent action of the municipality of Schoenberg, Berlin, is typical. It is now paying baby bounties at the rate of $12.50 a head for the first born, $2.50 a head for all later born, and no questions asked. It is to be feared that any success which the feminists may gain in securing state aid for mothers in America will secure, as in Schoenberg, in England, in France, and in Australia, merely a small uniform sum. This acts dysgenically because it is a stimulus to married people to have large families in inverse proportion to their income, and is felt most by those whose purpose in having children is least approvable.