The first essential of character, it must be insisted, is the power of self-support, of self-direction, of self-achievement. This is, now seen to be an essential for women as for men. The only adequate solution of problems of commercialized prostitution includes for each girl capable of that attainment the power of easy and complete self-support. Hence, the family has no right to take from its members some present advantage which will handicap potential workers, either boys or girls, in their struggle to meet adult responsibilities of economic life. Hence, again, the whole question of vocational preparation for girls, as well as for boys, has right-of-way as against any temporary or easily dispensed-with helping in family emergencies which may seriously hamper the future wage-earner. This is now being seen clearly; and the consequence is that parents do without for themselves both luxuries and often comforts, in order that their children shall have a chance in general education and in vocational training to fit them for later economic success. This fact, so honorable to parents, often leads away from family unity by increasing a chasm of culture and of condition between parents and children. This, again, indicates that the modern standardization of child-care and of parental duty has in it elements that demand far more developed character in all the members of a family in order to hold together by affection, justice, and higher compulsions of tenderness those who have by virtue of the self-sacrifice of the older ones lost touch on many of the common fields of effort. =Farming and the Farmer's Wife.=--There is one great area both of man's work and of woman's work which supremely needs better understanding and more efficient organization in the interest of family life. That is the basic industry of all civilized life, farming, and woman's service in the farm home. We now generally place our farm houses far apart from each other, and we have usually but one house on the place and that for the owner and his family. We have no adequate provisions by which the seasonal nature of agricultural work can be so arranged by ingenious dovetailing with other forms of labor as to furnish an all-the-year employment to men who wish to marry and bring up families and yet do not own but work upon farms. We have few means for easing the burdens of household labor for the farmer's wife, and hence the larger the farm, the more property it represents, the more men laborers it demands for the owner's successful conduct of the business, the more unbearable the pressure upon health, strength, time, and energy of the woman who is the farmer's helpmate. These are some of the fundamental reasons for the drift away from farm life to the cities and the towns, a drift seen to be ominous and if not checked socially destructive of national prosperity when the Great War forced us to take account of social conditions in the United States more seriously than ever before.