Even now fundamental parental obligations are supposed to be the same in all classes, but the well-to-do can fulfil them after a fashion without the assistance of the State, though often with much insecurity and strain. Were there a department of Public Guardianship upon which every parent might rely for counsel and effective help, very many whose difficulty is not the actual housing and feeding of their children would be only too glad to take advantage of its advice. And even amongst the well-to-do, fathers and mothers die or lose their faculties, or are unfit, and the nation’s children are the sufferers. The appointment of a Public Guardian to cooperate with parents in all ranks of society is the only effective method, not only of preventing the national disgrace of “waste children,” but of doing away with the hardships, the distrusts, the fears and the resentments caused amongst the workers by the present harsh and ill-defined exercise of national Guardianship. It is to the collective interest of a nation that its children should flourish. They are the future nation. To them the State will be entrusted. To them the work, the duty, the scheme of things will be handed on. Suppose children were recognised to be more important than wealth—suppose they were really put first—what machinery have we which already deals with their lives, their health, and their comfort? We have a national system of education which we propose to extend and elaborate, and to which we have recently attached medical inspection, and we have the time-honoured machinery of the home. The children of the poor pass their lives within the limits of these two institutions, and behind both stands the State, which entirely regulates one and is constantly modifying the other. To equip the home for the vital responsibility committed to its care, the new administrative agency must have the power to go further than the offering of advice and information to its fellow-guardians, the parents. It must endow every child who needs it with a grant sufficient to secure it a minimum of health and comfort. Maintenance grants from the State are no new thing. Inadequate grants are now made to the parents of free scholars in secondary schools. What is wanted is the extension and development of the idea. Based on the need of the child and limited thereby, the grant would not become a weapon to keep down wages. Men and women whose children are secure are free to combine, to strike, to take risks. Men and women who have the entire burden of a family on their shoulders are not really free to do so.