Exceptional circumstances exist, to provide for which the crèche, the kindergarten, the asylum, and the industrial school must continue for the present. But instead of trying to make these expedients universal, we ought to endeavour to eradicate the causes which render them necessary. This would be road-making in the right direction. The other is a short cut, which will infallibly take us longer round. It is true that poverty now gives many children unhealthy homes. Attack the causes of poverty then, instead of taking away the children and leaving the parents in misery. It is true that much parental affection is injudicious. Then educate people to be parents. It is true that parents now increase the inheritance of certain children at the cost of the others. Then lessen the possibility of this. But do not deprive all children of their rightful inheritance: home feelings and memories of home, home sorrows and home joys, all that gives its peculiar tone, colour, and perfume to every human being’s disposition. Do not abolish the most important of all collective education, that of the children through the parents and of the parents through the children. Doubtless, love’s freedom will bring about more complicated family relations than at present. From this point of view there seems to be an evident advantage to the children in State institutions, where their lives would not be so immediately affected by dislocations in those of their parents. But to deprive the majority of children of their homes, because the minority might thus lose theirs, would be a worse expedient than that of connecting the home more closely with the mother and developing human beings so that they may remain friends even when they have ceased to be husband and wife, and may thus continue to be capable of co-operating for the welfare of the children. In a word, it is not the family that ought to be abolished, but the rights of the family that must be reformed; not education by parents that ought to be avoided, but education of parents that must be introduced; not the home that ought to be done away with, but homelessness that must cease. The State rearing of children would work like the feeding of foundlings on Pasteurised milk: they sickened when they were thus deprived of certain indispensable bacilli. The people who were brought up on the germ-free milk of universal benevolence, in the untainted air of uniform order; who had their origin in the love of the majority, their nourishment from the automatic machine of the institution, their education in the mould of the school, their occupation as wax-makers in the social hive—these unfortunate creatures might find existence so tame and so empty that those of them whom weariness of life had not driven to suicide before the age of twenty might use their atavistic longing for happiness in burning down the institutions and rebuilding homes for human beings.