Failing our principles, we shall be reduced to the prejudices
which serve as principles for our political parties. We shall have
individualist and socialist at loggerheads, the friends of marriage and
its enemies, and many other opposing parties who cannot solve the
question for us because they have not waited first to discover its
fundamentals. The rights of mothers can be approached only from the
point of view of the rights of children. We may happen to believe, as
the present writer certainly does, that parents should be responsible
for their children. He once lectured for, and published the lectures in
association with, a body called the British Constitution Association,
which holds the same belief, but when he found as he did that protests
were raised against any suggestion to help children whose parents do not
do their duty, it became plain that principles which were right in a
merely secondary and conditional way were being made absolute and
fundamental. The fundamental is that the child shall be cared for; the
conditional and secondary principle is that this is best effected
through the parents. To say that if the parents will not do it, the
child must be left to starve, is immoral and indecent. Worse words than
those, if such exist, would be required to describe our neglect of
illegitimate infancy; our cruelty toward widows and orphans; our utterly
careless maintenance of the conditions which produce these hapless
beings in such vast numbers.
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