=The child as a future ancestor.=—­If the children of the future are to prove a blessing to society and not a burden, then the children of the present need to become fully conscious of their responsibilities as agencies in bringing to pass this desirable condition.  If the teacher or parent can, somehow, cause the boy of to-day to visualize his own grandson, in the years to come, pointing the finger of scorn at him and calling down maledictions upon him because of a taint in the family blood, that picture will persist in his consciousness, and will prove a deterrent factor in his life.  The desire for immortality is innate in every human breast, we are taught, but certainly no boy will wish to achieve that sort of immortality.  He will not consider with complacency the possibility of his becoming a pariah in the estimation of his descendants, and will go far in an effort to avert such a misfortune.  There is no man but will shudder when he contemplates the possibility of having perpetuated upon his gravestone or in the memory of his grandchild the word “Unclean.”

=The heart of the problem.=—­Here we arrive at the very heart of the problem that confronts the home and the school.  We may close our eyes, or look another way, but the problem remains.  We may not be able to solve it, but we cannot evade it.  Each day it calls loudly to every parent and every teacher for a solution.  The health and happiness of the coming generations depend upon the right education of the present one, and this responsibility the home and the school can neither shirk nor shift.  We take great unction to ourselves for the excellence of the horses, pigs, and cattle that we have on exhibition at the fairs, but are silent as to our failures in the form of children, that drag out a half-life in our hospitals.  In one state it costs more to care for the defectives and unfortunates than to provide schooling facilities for all the normal children, but this fact is not written into party platforms nor proclaimed from the stump.  In the face of such a fact society seems to proceed upon the agreeable assumption that the less said the better.

=Misconceptions.=—­We temporize with the fundamental situation by the use of such soporifics as the expressions “necessary evil” and the like, but that leaves us exactly at the starting point.  Many well-meaning people use these expressions with great frequency and freedom and seem to think that in so doing they have given a proof of virtue and public spirit.  It were worthy only of an iconoclast to deprecate or disparage the legislative attempts to foster clean living.  All such efforts are 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