The American family is the scapegoat of the nations. Foreign critics visit us and report that children are forward and incorrigible, that wives are pampered and extravagant, and that husbands are henpecked and cultureless. Nor is this the worst. It only skims the surface by comparison with the strictures of home-grown criticism. Our domestic arbiters of every school have a deeper fault to find: they see the family as a crumbling institution, a swiftly falling bulwark. Catholic pulpits call upon St. Joseph to save the ruins and Puritan moralists invoke Will Carlton, believing in common with most of our public guardians that only saints and sentimentalism can help in such a crisis. Meanwhile the American family shows the usual tenacity of form, beneath much superficial change, uniting in various disguises the most ancient and the newest modes of living. In American family life, if anywhere, the Neolithic meets the modern and one needs to be very rash or very wise to undertake the nice job of finding out which is which. But one at least refuses to defeat one’s normal curiosity by joining in the game of blind-man’s buff, by means of which public opinion about the family secures a maximum of activity along with a minimum of knowledge. A little science would be of great help. But popular opinion does not encourage scientific probing of the family. In this field, not honesty but evasion is held to be the best policy. Rather than venture where taboo is so rife and the material so sensitive, American science would much rather promote domestic dyes and seedless oranges. It is true that we have the Federal Census with its valuable though restrained statistics. But even the census has always taken less interest in family status and family composition, within the population, than in the classification of property and occupation and the fascinating game of “watching Tulsa grow.” In no country is the collection of vital statistics so neglected and sporadic and the total yield of grab-bag facts so unamenable to correlation. Through the persistent effort of the Children’s Bureau, this situation has been considerably improved during the past ten years; so that now there exist the so-called “registration areas” where births, marriages, and deaths are actually recorded. For the country as a whole, these vital facts still go unregistered. The prevailing sketchiness in the matter of vital statistics is in distinct contrast to the energy and thoroughness with which American political machinery manages to keep track of the individual who has passed the age of twenty-one.