There is a certain temporary relief gained, when children have been entirely dependent on the mother, and she has had no bread to give them. At first, when the relieving officer takes the children and she knows that at night they will be snug and warm and in the morning dressed and fed, there is a great wave of thankfulness and relief. But soon the mother asks herself, “why could not I have warmed and fed and dressed them, since I could have done it for less?” Even the simplest mothers have heard the whisper now. In their desperate loneliness they are gathering, by tens and by thousands, to ask for the custody of their own children. This social revolution may be like the French revolution, but it is surely not like the burning of witches, unless the witches are the ones that stand by the cradles of neglected childhood. How carefully Miss Richmond, appealing to our judgment and sound sense, figures out the seemingly fabulous sums that might have been saved to fight tuberculosis and feeble-mindedness, from the sums wasted in soldiers pensions. But why, I ask, is the whole country spell-bound, helpless and hopeless at the prospect of the mounting pension ladder? If we admit that the granting of pensions to disabled soldiers was right, why attack the principle instead of the abuse of the practise? Surely that could be helped. If a thing can be proven to be wrong and illogical by mathematics, as Miss Richmond has proved it to be, then it can be solved by mathematics. There is a leak somewhere. In the same way, if there are more children with their mothers, after a certain law has been passed, and at the same time more in the institutions, it shows, surely, that the attention of the community has been called to a lot of children unknown before or that someone has blundered in counting them. A new law does not produce a spontaneous crop of children, under the Juvenile Court limit. Where were those children? These are the things that a mother naturally asks. They say that the soldiers are dying out. But unless the risks and dangers and lack of independence of the life deter women in the future, there will always be mothers. But will there always be poor mothers? Have we not begun a war on poverty? Why is not the prevention and cure of poverty as wide and noble a field as the cure of tuberculosis? Are we not studying to eliminate it in the same way by destroying its breeding places, by rescuing the child, by no longer considering poverty as “the curse of God?” Poverty and tuberculosis and other dark shapes go hand in hand. Why is not the prevention of needless poverty also a constructive health measure? And why, if we are to be so very careful and scientific about it, is the question of non-support always confused with that of the death of the wage-earner? The man cannot take his responsibilities with him into the next life, whatever we say, and the poor cannot carry adequate insurance till we copy England or Germany.