Surely, the first duty of society should be to secure healthy conditions for the lives of the young, so as to lay a firm physical foundation for the progress of the race.
This we neglect to do when we look with indifference or complacency upon the present phase of unrestricted competition in industrial work amongst women.

So long as we refuse to insist, as a nation, that along with the growth of national wealth there shall be secured those conditions of healthy home life requisite for the sound, physical, moral, and intellectual growth of the young, at whatever cost of interference with so-called private liberty of action, we are rendering ourselves as a nation deliberately responsible for the continuance of that creature whose appearance gives a loud lie to our claim of civilization--the gutter child of our city streets.

Thousands of these children, as we well know, the direct product of economic maladjustment, grow up every year--in our great cities to pass from babyhood into the street arab, afterwards to become what they may, tramp, pauper, criminal, casual labourer, feeble-bodied, weak-minded, desolate creatures, incapable of strong, continuous effort at any useful work.

These are the children who have never known a healthy home.

With that poverty which compels mothers to be wage-earners, lies no small share of the responsibility of this sin against society and moral progress.