R

EPORTS received in the United

States from Germany show that Germany is taking children away from their mothers by the thousand. The little ones are incarcerated in asylums and the mothers are put to work as factory hands. This separation is a settled policy and it affects only the masses the rich and powerful and the middle class are not thus ruined. But the masses make the nation, and by breaking up homes and rapping mother love in this ontrageous fashion, Germany is undermining the very nationality for which its soldiers believe themselves to be fighting.

Any national life must rest on motherhood and the home. Loyalty and love of the home land and a distinctive culture cannot be cultivated among children raised in barrack-like, institutions where mother-care and mother-love is displaced by machine-like discipline and routine. Children raised in these institutions can never be successful home makers and national ideals and culture cannot be erected on a population which spent its impressionable years in a soulless institution.

Nature designed mothers to take care of their children, and this duty cannot be successfully delegated to any other person and no institution can perform the functions of a home in any nation.

While the nature of motherhood and the home are recognized in all literature and all poetry, we see all civilized nations breaking up home and murdering the love and instincts of mothers for the mere crime of poverty. Efficiency must be the reason for this outrageous system of separating mothers from their children, but it is not efficient and if continued in Germany or in any other country, that country will be defeated, not by its enemies on the battle line, but by the assassination of mother love at home,

by the transformation of the soft woman with the home instinct into the hard, coarse factory or farm hand and the extinction of the home instinct in the institutionalized children.

The United States in times of peace and great prosperity has made this same error, but is now beginning a different method. Thousands of mothers have had their children taken from them because of poverty in the rich land which produces more than enough for all. But now in America the mothers' pension system is being tried. It is growing with such rapidity and is proving so efficient and so productive of happiness and health and strength that new possibilities are being revealed. Many now believe that the mothers' pension system in America will develop until all men will support all children and then no wife will have to live with her husband to get a living. Husbands and fathers will then be forced to win and hold their position as head of the family on some other grounds than that of the bread winner-thus the sordid relations will be ousted from family life and the lover relation will be prolonged.

When endowed with a pension ample for the material necessities and for education and home and growth in all respects, the pensioned mother is required. to study methods to improve her technique as mother and housekeeper.

Thus study based on the natural and strong instincts of a woman to do the best for her children soon changes the most careless and incompetent woman into a thoughtful and efficient director of home and children. The possibilities in this mother training are so great that many thinkers predict a super race of men as the result. As the mothers' pension system will make it unnecessary for a woman to live with a man simply to get a living for the children she already has the reproduction of human beings in

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disgust and unhappiness will end. This will be the great eugenic system which will stop the birth of any except desired children, endowed with love and passion for their enraptured parents. The reproduction of children in stupidity and poverty will end and the world will be relieved of a great burden of unfit human beings.

Henry Neil, father of the mothers' pension system in America, has found. that a large percent of the children born weak-minded and otherwise unfit come from women who have been forced by economic necessity to live with men after love and respect had fled, simply to get a living for themselves and the children they already have.

"The greatest crime against the human race," he said in a recent address before a scientific society, "is the production of children without love or passion. The 'next greatest crime is the separation of mothers from their children and the substitution of an institution for a home. Any country that permits these things to go on will injure its chances in the world of nations. I fear that the great European countries now at war will all be ruined if they persist in old methods and break up the thousands of families

left husbandless by the war. A country may be victorious in battle on land and sea, but destroy itself by permitting its future men and woman to grow up in institutions and the reproduction of the race to go on in poverty and disgust. I have found that both Germany and England are breaking up families by the wholesale.

"In the United States a great organization, called 'The Committee of Mercy,' headed by Elihu Root, former secretary of state, is collecting funds to build asylums for children in France. They think they are helping France. But they are not. They are helping to kill that beautiful France which has always been distinguished for its beautiful home life. The Committee of Mercy, however, may be actuated by different motives. It is very likely that the men behind this movement desire the mothers of France to work in factories to produce profits which may be taxed to pay the interest on bonds held in the United States. What does it mean when men go to fight for their homes and fireside and the government at home breaks up the homes? It is bad policy, it is more cruel than warfare and is destructive of national life."