There has ever been, on the question of his children, a struggle between man and nature. Endowed with the possibilities of a large offspring man has fought the burdens that nature has thrust upon him. On first view, it seems that parental affection never develops to great degree unless the economic conditions are favourable; yet the various artifices and “laws” used by tribes to get rid of children would show that parental affection kept struggling with the inclinations of men. In other words, if we find, as we do, female children sacrificed in one place because they are useless, and all first-born children sacrificed in another place because the gods must be propitiated, it is evident that parental affection (as represented by the women) was strong enough to force the male sovereigns to invent plausible excuses and taboos in order to have the women give up their offspring. Considering all that is being done, said, and written on the subject of the child and the relation of the state and citizen toward the child, it would seem safe to assume that there would be some interest in the attitude of our predecessors toward children. From the regulation of Romulus, as set forth by Dionysius Halicarnassus, to the story of Mary Ellen, as set forth by a settlement worker on the East Side of New York City, is a far cry, but the progress from the first to the second is steady. The Roman General, Agathocles, who made as a part of the terms of peace with the Carthaginians an agreement on the part of that branch of the Semitic race that they would cease to sacrifice children, was a legitimate sociological progenitor of the representative of the arm of the law that stops a drunken father from beating his child and creates a Children’s Court where the child gets gentleness with justice, not contamination and corruption. [Illustration: MARY ELLEN AND THE SCISSORS WITH WHICH SHE WAS BEATEN] “Every historian ought to be a jurist; every jurist ought to be a historian,” says Ortolan, and the historian of child progress feels not only the truth of that statement but the added necessity of meeting the various economic theories that have dealt with the care of the child, from those of Lycurgus to the latter-day essay of Malthus. The law of primogeniture and the varying laws of inheritance have occasionally led to the study of children as children, but generally the main interest in them of historian and jurist has been as a channel for the transmission of property. Theories about population and the fascinating pursuit of unravelling tangled economic laws, have obscured the fact that the attitude of a state toward children has been, with few variations, an index to its social progress. The same thing has been said of women, but while the Greeks treated women well, yet with the exception of the single _dema_[10] of Thebes, infanticide was common in all the Greek States.