Moreover, it is to be noted that in this matter the State has already
recognised its public obligation to provide remedial aid in its
provision for the education and lodging of the blind, the deaf and the
dumb, and in the measures taken within recent years for the special
education of the defective and the epileptic. The provision for these
purposes may indeed be justified on the grounds that the expense of the
education of children of the industrial classes so afflicted is beyond
the powers of any one individual, or group of individuals, to supply,
and that unless undertaken by the State it would not be efficiently
made, with the consequence of throwing the maintenance hereafter of
these particular classes upon the community: on the ground, therefore,
of the future protective benefit to society, such expense may be
legitimately laid upon the community as a whole. Further, in these
cases, the danger of the weakening of the sense of parental
responsibility is not an extreme danger to the Commonwealth, since the
aid is definitely limited to a restricted number of cases, and since
the moral obligation imposed upon the individual to provide for the
education of his children could in many cases not be fulfilled without
the by far greater portion of the expense being provided by means of
public or voluntary aid.

In like manner, the expense of the special education of the morally
defective in Industrial Schools and in other institutions may be
justified on the ground of the present and future protective benefit to
society. In these cases parental government has either altogether ceased
or become too weak to act as an effective restraining force, and as a
consequence the community for its own self-preservation has to undertake
the control and education of the actual or incipient youthful criminal.
In their Report the Royal Commissioners on Physical Training (Scotland)
sadly declare that Industrial and similar institutions certainly give
the boys and girls who come under their influence advantages in feeding
and physical training which are not open to the children of independent
and respectable though poor parents. _The contrast between the condition
of children as seen in the poorer day schools and children in Industrial
institutions, whose parents have altogether failed to do their duty, is
both marked and painful._[19]

And yet it might be urged that the protective benefit likely to be
derived in the future by the provisi