If the mother is proved wholly incompetent in mind or character we have acquired a social right to take her child from her and place it where it can receive better nurture and training. We are beginning to recognize the corollary duty of social aid to all women of good character, motherly feeling, and any fair degree of intelligence in their function of motherhood. There are those hopelessly incompetent who should never be allowed to have children. There are far more with power to bear and rear children successfully whom adverse circumstances submerge to incompetency. These, we are now learning, must be helped in some way, for society's sake even more than for their own, if they are willing to undertake parental service to the race. The passage of the so-called Sheppard-Towner Bill is one answer in the United States to the right of the child and its mother to life and health. There are those who deplore the tendency to seek for such aid to individuals through the Federal Government. The Governor of New York State, for example, although a man of progressive ideas and liberal point of view, opposed "starting aid to mothers and babies from the Washington end," declaring that work for the "welfare of citizens of any class should start at the locality to be benefited." He would not have the people educated to depend upon the Federal Government for benefits. He feared that the Sheppard-Towner Bill would tend to "make the public expect to be nursed from the cradle to the grave" and be a detriment to the public life rather than a benefit. New York State made a good appropriation for its own aid to mothers and babies, but did not apply for the Federal aid in addition. By the middle of the second month of 1922, however, nearly thirty states had accepted the Act as a welcome help in their welfare work, and few will be left outside of its provisions by the end of the year. The fear that such an Act would make the general government the active controller and director of the lives of parents and their children in most intimate ways seems not justified by the facts. The Bill, when passed, simply provided money to be given to the states on the fifty-fifty basis "for the purpose of cooeperating with them in promoting the welfare and hygiene of maternity and infancy." The specific plans for each state are to be made by the state agency in charge of the work and the only Federal supervision is that of standardization, by which the Chief of the Children's Bureau, the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, and the Commissioner of Education must approve those plans as "reasonably appropriate and adequate to carry out the purposes of the Act" before the money of the Federal Government is passed over to any state.