over it. The State needs healthy men and women, and by any negligence in
attending to this need it inflicts serious charges of all sorts upon
itself, and at the same time dangerously impairs its efficiency in the
world. Nations have begun to recognize the desirability of education, but
they have scarcely yet begun to realize that the nationalization of health
is even more important than the nationalization of education. If it were
necessary to choose between the task of getting children educated and the
task of getting them well-born and healthy it would be better to abandon
education. There have been many great peoples who never dreamed of
national systems of education; there has been no great people without the
art of producing healthy and vigorous children.

This matter becomes of peculiar importance in great industrial states like
England, the United States, and Germany, because in such states a tacit
conspiracy tends to grow up to subordinate national ends to individual
ends, and practically to work for the deterioration of the race. In
England, for instance, this tendency has become peculiarly well marked
with disastrous results. The interest of the employed woman tends to
become one with that of her employer; between them they combine to crush
the interests of the child who represents the race, and to defeat the laws
made in the interests of the race which are those of the community as a
whole. The employed woman wishes to earn as much wages as she can and with
as little interruption as she can; in gratifying that wish she is, at the
same time, acting in the interests of the employer, who carefully avoids
thwarting her.

This impulse on the employed woman's part is by no means always and
entirely the result of poverty, and would not, therefore, be removed by
raising her wages. Long before marriage, when little more than a child,
she has usually gone out to work, and work has become a second nature. She