child is to have a really good initial chance in the world. The only
conceivable solution of this problem is one that will ensure that no
child, or only a few accidental and exceptional children, will be born
outside these advantages. It is no good trying to sentimentalize the
issue away. This is the end we must attain, to attain any effectual
permanent improvement in the conditions of childhood. A certain number
of people have to be discouraged and prevented from parentage, and a
great number of homes have to be improved. How can we ensure these
ends, or how far can we go towards ensuring them?

The first step to ensuring them is certainly to do all we can to
discourage reckless parentage, and to render it improbable and
difficult. We must make sure that whatever we do for the children, the
burden of parental responsibility must not be lightened a feather-
weight. All the experience of two hundred years of charity and poor law
legislation sustains that. But to accept that as a first principle is
one thing, and to apply it by using a wretched little child as our
instrument in the exemplary punishment of its parent is another. At
present that is our hideous practice. So long as the parents are not
convicted criminals, so long as they do not practise indictable cruelty
upon their offspring, so long as the children themselves fall short of
criminality, we insist upon the parent "keeping" the child. It may be
manifest the child is ill-fed, harshly treated, insufficiently clothed,
dirty and living among surroundings harmful to body and soul alike, but
we merely take the quivering damaged victim and point the moral to the
parent. "This is what comes of your recklessness," we say. "Aren't you
ashamed of it?" And after inscrutable meditations the fond parent
usually answers us by sending out the child to beg or sell matches or
by some equally effective retort. Now a great number of excellent
people pretend that this is a dilemma. "Take the child away," it is