Against the wickedness of parents, however, as against their ill-treatment, the child must be protected, and that in a much greater degree than now by a constant extension of the right and duty of society’s intervention in these cases. But, when it can be avoided, the children ought just as little to be deprived of the protection of home as the home should be deprived of the protection children give to it, by compelling the parents to at least some measure of self-discipline, self-control, and self-sacrifice, whereby their souls are extended beyond the individual ego. In the day when the “hardening” atmosphere of the State institutions encompasses all children, human virtue will sink with even greater rapidity them human happiness. All that has been said above does not imply any blindness to the fact that even the best homes are now penitentiaries in comparison with what they may become when the formation of a home has become a science and an art. At present the home is fortunately—or unfortunately—neither inspected nor rewarded with prizes. But perhaps this time is coming—as already in France the seventh child is brought up at the cost of the State, and decorations are proposed for those women who have borne and brought up the greatest number of efficient children. Then, if not before, will the “liberated” women perhaps regain some interest in the development of their powers in the direction of the home. What now frequently diminishes externally the value even of good homes, is that they are arranged to promote a kind of “aspiration,” diametrically opposed to genuine life-enhancement, whose first condition is that the home in a material respect should bear a relation to the health and comfort of its own members, not the habits of life of outsiders. What again detracts in a spiritual respect from even the very best homes is that their members still retain the family rudeness and want of consideration of older days, a rudeness which—owing to the new sensitiveness, the deeper strength of personal consciousness—causes even from childhood daily pain that, as infallibly as the grosser faults of bad homes, poisons air and food. People still allow themselves within the home circle a scornfulness of each other’s peculiarities, a silencing of each other’s opinions, a prying into each other’s secrets, a betrayal of each other’s confidences, which in daily life place the members of the circle on a footing of armed neutrality. In good homes, affection, and in inferior ones fear, stops them from breaking out into open war; for in both cases all know each other’s vulnerable spots so well, that they are perfectly well aware how severe the conflict would be for themselves as well as for the others.