With regard to the first recommendation (_a_), people begin to recognise that a misuse of the rights and powers involved in parental authority must be visited, not by private condemnation only, but by that of the criminal law. It is seen that the standpoint of the existing law, by which only the gravest offences, such as the abduction of a child, or the infliction upon a child of grievous bodily harm, are specified as punishable, is inadequate. Ever more general becomes the demand that parental neglect of the proper maintenance or education of a child should be constituted an offence _per se_, and dealt with as such. It is only in the case specified in (_a_) 1 that deliberate or gross neglect constitutes the essential quality of the offence. (If all cases of neglect were punishable, the provision (_a_) 1 would operate chiefly against offenders of the lower classes, since it is in their case that such neglect most commonly occurs.) In (_a_) 2 deliberate or gross neglect is no essential part of the offence, because the idler, the man led astray by his passions, &c., should not escape punishment. In (_a_) 3 simple neglect is made punishable, because in such cases the community becomes responsible for the maintenance of the child. Nothing must be done to encourage what is really quite common--that parents should neglect their child, simply in order that it should be taken away from their care, and that in this way they may be freed from the burden of its maintenance. It is essential that no complaint by the injured party or his representatives should be requisite to the initiation of a prosecution, for in most cases the child is itself unable to complain, and the legal representative is often the prime offender. Moreover, it is not the child alone that is injured, but also the State, which has entrusted the offender with the care of the child. The objection has been raised that such legal provisions as have been suggested would be directed principally against the lower classes, that they would often lead to the unjust infliction of punishment, that no one can be compelled to love another, and that it would be difficult to determine the precise point at which the proper limits of parental authority had been exceeded. But all these objections are invalid, if only the gross cases that have been mentioned are made punishable, and provided that wherever necessary the child is removed from the care of the offender.