"We would endeavor to prevent illness and loss of life among babies and children. Our circulars would be distributed in all languages among all of our citizens. We would employ specialists to direct the feeding, clothing, and general rearing of the children of all conditions. We would advocate the protection of children until they reached the age of sixteen; and would endeavor to assist in the supervision of these children until they were of legal age. My idea would be to have all young people under twenty-one remain in a sense the wards of schools. If they have had, at any early age, to leave school and take the burdens of bread-winning upon their young shoulders and their untried hearts, then I would advise an extension of school authority. The schools should be provided with assistant superintendents whose business it would be to help these young bread-winners find positions in keeping with their tastes and abilities, thus aiding them in the most practical and beneficent way, to hold their places in this struggling, modern world. "It is an economic measure of the loftiest type. It will provide against the waste of bodies and souls; it is a device for the conservation and the scientific development of human beings. It is part and parcel of the new, practical religion--a new prayer. "'Prayer,' says the old hymn, 'is the soul's sincere desire.' "Many of us have lost our belief in the old forms of prayer. We are beginning to realize that, to a great extent, the answer to prayer lies in our own hands. Our answers come when we use the powers that have been bestowed upon us. More and more each year, those who employ their intellects for constructive purposes are turning their energies toward the betterment of the world. They have a new conception of 'the world to come.' It means to them our good brown Mother Earth, warm and fecund and laden with fruits for the consumption of her children as it may be under happier conditions. They wish to increase the happiness of those children, to elevate them physically and mentally, and to give their spirits, too often imprisoned and degraded by hard circumstance, a chance to grow. "When you let the sunlight in to a stunted tree, with what exultant gratitude it lifts itself toward the sun! How its branches greet the wind and sing in them, how its little leaves come dancing out to make a shelter for man and the birds and the furred brothers of the forest! But this, wonderful and beautiful as it is, is but a small thing compared with the way in which the soul of a stunted child--stunted by evil or by sunless environment--leaps and grows and sings when the great spiritual elements of love and liberty are permitted to reach it. "You have talked of the conservation of forests; and you speak of a great need--an imperative cause. I talk of the conservation of children--which is a greater need and a holier right.