The young mind is like an unfurnished house. The rooms are empty. There are no pictures on the walls. But its unblotted, exquisitely-sensitised spaces are ceaselessly filming indelible records of everything seen and felt and apprehended. One impression may correct, or may distort, others. Or that right point-of-view which is judgment may focus all impressions in the true perspective which reveals their true values and proportions. But until such judgment has been formed by mental development, it is vitally important that all the impressions absorbed by young minds, whether of their life-conditions and associates, of books or of plays, shall be fair and simple and wholesome. Thus, the foundations of mind and of character are laid in clean, intelligising and uplifting influences. XI While we deplore, as appalling, that during the first fifteen months of War, 109,725 of our fighting men were killed or died, the returns of the Registrar-General show that during the twelve months of the peace preceding War, _there died 140,957 of the nation's children_, at less than five years old; 95,608 of these at less than a year old. Consider it! War, with its destructive engines of bomb and shell, more or less swiftly and painlessly kills just over a hundred thousand men, in the course of fifteen months. Peace, with its destructive transgressions against Nature, kills in less time a far greater number of defenceless babes and children, by slow and more or less torturing forms of disease. Babies, even when unhealthy, come into existence endowed with a certain Life-potential. And they struggle hard and painfully to live. It is amazing to see the odds against which the poor things battle; and battle successfully. It is only the fearfulness of the odds to which most of them are subjected that succeeds in killing them. Pain and suffering are spurs to adult development. In children they are as needlessly cruel as they are permanently injurious. Far from fitting, they _unfit_ them for life. The ratio of mortality is no guide, of course, to the immeasurable injuries wrought to mind and body by these same fearful odds upon the children who survive; and who survive, maimed, diseased, degenerate, to live out lives of disability, of joylessness and ineffectiveness. It will be said--and said truly--that much of this high infant-mortality results, not from maternal omissions, but from paternal commissions. Well, that alas! is another of the terrible wrongs against children which lie at the door of the sex. Were there not women whose lives are passed in engendering and transmitting the direst of all the diseases human evil has bred, the hapless imbecile and paralytic, the blind, the deaf, the ulcerous, the slowly-wasting, tortured little ones who fill our asylums and hospitals would not be.