in a society where woman is the repository of morality. Illegitimacy, on the other hand, or at least that large share of it which implies a fall from conventional virtue, is an embarrassing suggestion of sexual need in woman. Therefore, it is a disturbing phenomenon, intimating as it does to virtuous women that the duplex morality to which their freedom is sacrificed is unnatural and unworkable. There is a sense, of course, in which extra-legal motherhood is, if not sinful, at least unjust. The mother knows that the child she bears out of wedlock will be forced, although innocent, to share with her in the world’s displeasure at her defiance of conventional taboo, and that the sneers of its legitimately born playmates may have a blighting effect upon its spiritual development. She knows also, unless she be well-to-do or especially well qualified to earn, that her child will be at a disadvantage from the start in the matter of livelihood and education unless the father be willing--or required by law--to contribute to its support. There is likely to be a grim consistency in legal injustices. Sometimes the denial of one right makes expedient the denial of another, as when the poor, having been reduced by legalized privilege to want and squalor, are legally deprived of the alcohol with which they increase their wretchedness in an attempt to find forgetfulness of their misery. The denial to women of economic opportunity has made expedient denial of freedom in performing the function of motherhood. Men, having enjoyed a virtual monopoly of earning power, have been regarded as the natural providers for women and children; therefore a woman has been required to get a legal provider before she could legally get a child; and if one accepted her legal disabilities without questioning their justice, this restraint might appear quite justifiable. This may be taken as an argument for weakness or wantonness in the unmarried mother. If so, it must certainly apply with equal force to the unmarried father--with double force indeed, for he knows that his act will not only add to the difficulties, numerous enough under the best circumstances, that his child will have to contend with, but that it means social ostracism for the mother. Thus every illegitimate child, as society is at present constituted, is the victim not only of social but of parental injustice.