In earlier generations the child was taught to speak of its parents in a respectful and grateful tone as the “august authors of its being,” but this right and proper instruction in reverence was coupled with an arbitrary disposal of the child, and a certain harshness in its training against which the later generations have revolted. As is usual the reformers have deviated from rectitude in the opposite direction, so that to-day to find children with deep respect for their parents is uncommon. Reverence is being exacted by some rather from the parent towards the child as a fresh, new and unspoilt being. This too often results in spoiling the child, which is an equally foolish and hampering proceeding. The child should be taught from its earliest days profound respect, reverence and gratitude towards its parents, and in particular towards its mother, for of her very life she gave it the incomparable gift of life. True parents give the child the best and freshest and most beautiful impulses of their lives, and, at the cost of bodily anguish the mother bears it, and its parents for long years nurture it, sacrificing many enjoyments which they might have but for the cost and care of rearing it. This should be realized by the child, who then cannot but feel gratitude to and reverence for the authors of its being. The sheer beauty of the world, were there no other gain from living, is so great that the gift of eyes and a mind to perceive it should place the recipient of that gift for ever in a reverential debt towards the pair who gave. But the value of the beauty of life, and a just appreciation of the immense gift which parenthood confers cannot be realized by all. To-day alas, millions are born into circumstances so wretched that life can scarcely involve a perception of beauty, or a probability of moral action and social service. Also many myriads of children are born of parents to whom they can feel that they owe nothing, because they know or inwardly perceive that they were not desired, that they were not profoundly and nobly loved throughout their coming, that they were hurled into this existence through accident, self-indulgence or stupidity. Yet parenthood which grants life even on these terms is a wonderful power, a cruel and relentless force perverted from its divine possibilities. Youth tends ever to right itself if it but escape the taint of the profound racial diseases, and the gift of a well-conditioned body is the creation of an incomparable set of co-ordinated powers in a world in which the potentialities for the use of those powers is magical. Innumerable are the efforts at present being made by countless different societies, official bodies and individual reformers to diminish the ever increasing ill-health and deterioration of our race, but their efforts are a fight on the losing side unless the fundamental and hitherto uncontrollable factors which make for health are there.