worthy of commendation; but in sadness it must be confessed that,
laudable as these efforts are, they have not produced results that are
wholly satisfactory. Defectives are still granted licenses to perpetuate
their kind; children still enervate their bodies and minds by the use of
narcotics; and society daintily lifts its skirts as it hurries past the
evil, pretending not to see. Legislation is an attempt to express public
sentiment in statutory form; but public sentiment must precede
legislation if it is to become effective. Efforts have been made through
the process of legislation to deny the granting of marriage licenses to
people who are physically unsound, but the efforts came to naught
because public sentiment has not attained to this plane of thinking.
Hence, we shall not have much help from legislation in solving our
problem, until public sentiment has been educated.

=The responsibility of the school.=--This education must come, in large
part, through the schools, but even these will fail until they come into
a full realization of the fact that their field of effort is life in the
large. Time was when the teacher thought she was employed to teach
geography, grammar, and arithmetic. Then she enlarged this to include
boys and girls. And now she needs to make another addition and realize
that her function is to teach boys and girls the subject of Life, using
the branches of study as a means to this end. In a report on the work of
the schools at Gary, Indiana, the statement is made that the first
purpose of these schools seems to be to produce efficient workers for
the mills. This seems to savor of the doctrine of educational
foreordination, and would make millwork and life synonymous. Life is
larger than any mill. We may be justified in educating one horse for the
plow and another for the race track, but this justification rests upon
the fact that horses are assets and not liabilities.