Character, ability, and reasoning power are not to be developed in this fashion. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether even a completely successful educational system could offset the evils of indiscriminate breeding and compensate for the misfortune of being a superfluous child. In recognizing the great need of education, we have failed to recognize the greater need of inborn health and character. "If it were necessary to choose between the task of getting children educated and getting them well born and healthy," writes Havelock Ellis, "it would be better to abandon education. There have been many great peoples who never dreamed of national systems of education; there have been no great peoples without the art of producing healthy and vigorous children. The matter becomes of peculiar importance in great industrial states, like England, the United States and Germany, because in such states, a tacit conspiracy tends to grow up to subordinate national ends to individual ends, and practically to work for the deterioration of the race."(8) Much less can education solve the great problem of child labor. Rather, under the conditions prevailing in modern society, child labor and the failure of the public schools to educate are both indices of a more deeply rooted evil. Both bespeak THE UNDERVALUATION OF THE CHILD. This undervaluation, this cheapening of child life, is to speak crudely but frankly the direct result of overproduction. "Restriction of output" is an immediate necessity if we wish to regain control of the real values, so that unimpeded, unhindered, and without danger of inner corruption, humanity may protect its own health and powers. (1) I am indebted to the National Child Labor Committee for these statistics, as well as for many of the facts that follow. (2) "People Who Go to Beets" Pamphlet No. 299, National Child Labor Committee. (3) California the Golden, by Emma Duke. Reprinted from The American Child, Vol. II, No. 3. November 1920. (4) Cf. Child Welfare in Oklahoma; Child Welfare in Alabama; Child Welfare in North Carolina; Child Welfare in Kentucky; Child Welfare in Tennessee. Also, Children in Agriculture, by Ruth McIntire, and other studies. (5) W. R. Inge: Outspoken Essays: p. 92 (6) Cf. Tredgold: Inheritance and Educability. Eugenics Review, Vol. Xiii, No. I, pp. 839 et seq. (7) Cf. New York Times, June 4, 1921. (8) "Studies in the Psychology of Sex," Vol. VI. p. 20. CHAPTER IV: The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded What vesture have you woven for my year? O Man and Woman who have fashioned it Together, is it fine and clean and strong, Made in such reverence of holy joy, Of such unsullied substance, that your hearts Leap with glad awe to see it clothing me, The glory of whose nakedness you know? "The Song of the Unborn" Amelia Josephine Burr