Can people not understand that State care of children would force upon the young generation life’s last and hardest experience, that of not being the most important or the nearest to anyone, and that this heavy fruit—under which old trees may give way—might deform the young ones for ever? Do not people see that, even if many homes are now hell, we should not sink to the lowest circle of hell—which Dante’s fancy made ice-cold—until the warmth was quenched which the hearths of home still throw out, and their place was taken by the steam-heating of the institution? When existence is made up of beings with starved hearts, frozen souls, obliterated characteristics—what materials will these afford for constructing the society of which they will form part? Will they even care to produce children as raw material for the human factories; or the necessaries for the maintenance of that life in which the elements of personal happiness are wanting? Will they even have the energy to take a decision about the order of society which robs them of life’s greatest values? So wonderfully strong is in man the need of having some place of his own, of being among his own, feeling himself at home in one poor corner of the world, in a single poor heart, that this feeling has even the power of clearing a morass into a spring by subterranean ways. On a railway journey in the South I once saw a woman, whose face, figure, and manners betrayed the completest downfall. This mother had a beautiful six-year-old daughter. Never was it more horrible to see a child at her mother’s knee; never did an amulet seem more powerless than the saint’s image that a pitying hand had hung about the child’s neck. But when the child leaned towards her mother, she was embraced by the drunken harlot with a tender emotion, which restored to her a spark of human dignity. And when the child read in the looks of her fellow-travellers the disgust her mother inspired, her dark eyes glowed with angry sorrow and she took up before her mother a position of protesting affection. No one could doubt that this child ought to be taken out of such unclean hands. But I wonder whether a better guardian would be able to give her the great emotion which at that moment dilated the child’s soul? If in a case like this one can even hesitate about the line between disadvantage and advantage, then in many other cases one will be convinced that it is not necessarily where a child has the best food, the cleanest bed, the most uninterrupted care, that it will thrive best, but rather where its soul may be expanded by the warmest and greatest emotions. Moreover it is one of the sacred mysteries of life that most parents, in themselves and towards one another, are worse than the child sees them; for the last being before whom a wretch casts off his protecting rags of human dignity is his child.