institutions specially founded for the protection of child life
and the promotion of puericulture. The permanent committee is in
Brussels, and a Congress of Infant Protection (_Goutte de Lait_)
is held every two years.

It will be seen that all the movements now being set in action for the
improvement of the race through the child and the child's mother,
recognize the intimacy of the relation between the mother and her child
and are designed to aid her, even if necessary by the exercise of some
pressure, in performing her natural functions in relation to her child. To
the theoretical philanthropist, eager to reform the world on paper,
nothing seems simpler than to cure the present evils of child-rearing by
setting up State nurseries which are at once to relieve mothers of
everything connected with the production of the men of the future beyond
the pleasure--if such it happens to be--of conceiving them and the trouble
of bearing them, and at the same time to rear them up independently of the
home, in a wholesome, economical, and scientific manner.[17] Nothing seems
simpler, but from the fundamental psychological standpoint nothing is
falser. The idea of a State which is outside the community is but a
survival in another form of that antiquated notion which compelled Louis
XIV to declare "L'Etat c'est moi!" A State which admits that the
individuals composing it are incompetent to perform their own most sacred
and intimate functions, and takes upon itself to perform them instead,
attempts a task which would be undesirable, even if it were possible of
achievement. It must always be remembered that a State which proposes to
relieve its constituent members of their natural functions and
responsibilities attempts something quite different from the State which
seeks to aid its members to fulfil their own biological and social
functions more adequately. A State which enables its mothers to rest when
they are child-bearing is engaged in a reasonable task; a State which