In the last analysis, unless some extreme form of socialism is better than the present industrial order and to be sought, the best way to help the family is to make fathers and mothers competent to take care of their own children without too great effort for themselves and without injurious consequences to the children.

Those Trade Union leaders may be right in principle when they hesitate to accept any public family aid scheme lest it make wages less rather than more and bring on a condition in which heroic struggle for one's own, the very pith and marrow of manhood in its relation to the family, be less esteemed and less practiced.
We are confronted, however, both in the movements for aid to maternity in care before and after childbirth, and in all the many provisions for child-saving that publicly supported Boards of Health are everywhere inaugurating, with a tendency of the greatest strength and social appeal, tendencies toward a sharing by all of the burdens heretofore borne only by the heads of families.

Some way must be devised by which such sharing will not cheat society of any gains to character and to sense of family responsibility which old systems of economic support of children have given the race.

Some way must be devised to recognize as economic assets of society the special sacrifice and service of the housemother in her function of life-giver for the coming generations and yet not ignore the father but rather bring him nearer to competent fatherhood as social conditions make it easier for him to bear his part of the family load.

The place for full discussion of these important considerations is not here, but the need for the child to have a father who can be the efficient partner of the competent mother in the task of rearing him must be always insisted upon, else reform measures that help the mother will only take us backward instead of forward.
=The Right of a Child to be Officially Counted.=--The next right of the child we must consider is the right to be listed as a member of the population.