No, is the answer of Charlotte Perkins Stetson[5] and of many others with her; the solution is State care of children. Look at all the wretched homes, where the children lack the most necessary mental and bodily conditions for healthy development. The collective rearing of all children would be both better and cheaper. Only those women who are liberated from the toils of the nursery and the kitchen are really free. To the woman accustomed to public activity, the tasks of the home are monotonous and tiresome. On the other hand, as a calling freely chosen, the care of children would satisfy those who have the gift for it. The majority of mothers are only ape-mothers to their little children, and, as the latter grow bigger, this vague affection is replaced by an obstinate misunderstanding. This is what one hears over and over again at the present time. And the more it is repeated, the more certain do women become that all these half-truths are—the truth. Thus it is the mothers who are not good enough to bring up their own children, that are expected to provide the new illustrious leaders of the community. It is the parents who themselves lack the talent and inclination for bringing up children, that—directly or indirectly—will have to superintend and select the persons who, in their place, will perform the duties of parents. In other words, they are to discover and appreciate qualities that they do not themselves possess. The trouble that a woman cannot take for the children to whom she has herself given life, is to be borne by other women for ten, twenty, or thirty children, who are not their own. Even to-day, there is sometimes to be found a kind of primitive type of womanliness, so widely maternal, with such a superfluity of strength, of tenderness, of talent for organisation that it is too powerful for a single home; a type which really possesses the immense wealth of spiritual elasticity, joy, and warmth, that is necessary in order that every such child should have its full share of these. But most women probably do not possess any more of these things than is just sufficient for their own children. And with these “elected mothers,” quickly worn out as they would be, ten, twenty, or thirty children would be as badly off mentally as they would be bodily if a single mother’s milk had to be divided among them all. It is even now a serious loss to society that so many human beings are enfeebled for life by insufficient nourishment in childhood. But according to the plan we have been discussing, which now has so many adherents, everyone would be starved in childhood as regards affection. It is even now a serious loss to culture that school-life makes children uniform. Still more irreparable would be the harm if their fashioning were in the hands of a thorough-going State care of children.