nly two courses open to us. The first is to relieve
the parents by lowering the standard of our demand; the second is to
relieve them by supplementing their efforts.

The first course, the Socialist holds, is not only cruel and unjust to
the innocent child, but an entirely barbaric and retrogressive thing
to do. It is a frank abandonment of all ideas of progress and world
betterment. He puts it aside, therefore, and turns to the alternative.
In doing that he comes at once into harmony with all the developmental
tendencies of the last hundred years. For a hundred years there has
been going on a process of supplementing and controlling parental
effort.

A hundred years or so ago, the parent was the supreme authority in a
child's destiny--short only of direct murder. Parents were held
responsible for their children's rearing to God alone; should they
fail, individual good-hearted people might, if they thought proper,
step in, give food, give help--provided the parents consented, that
is, but it was not admitted that the community as a whole was
concerned in the matter. Parents (and guardians in the absence of
parents) were allowed to starve their children, leave them naked, prey
upon their children by making them work in factories or as
chimney-sweeps and the like; the law was silent, the State acquiesced.
Good-hearted parents, on the other hand, who were unsuccessful in the
world's affairs, had the torment of seeing their children go short of
food and garments, grow up ignorant and feeble, their only hope of
help the chancy kindliness of their more prosperous neighbours and the
ill-organized charities left by the benevolent dead.

Through all the nineteenth century the irresistible logic of necessity
has been forcing people out of the belief in that state of affairs,
has been making them see the impossibility of leaving things so
absolutely to parental discretion and conscience, has been forcing
them towards a constructive and organizing, that is to say towards a
Socialist attitude. Essentially the Socialist attitude is this, an
insistence that parentage can no longer be regarded as an isolated
private matter; that the welfare of the children is of universal
importance, and must, therefore, be finally a matter of collective
concern. The State, which a hundred years ago was utterly careless of
children, is now every year becoming more and more their Guardian,
their Over-Parent.

To-day the power of the parents is limi