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 orphaned 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.