"society"? It can be only those other parents who have done a parent's duties, through unknown struggles and self-denial. It has very rarely been argued, so far as I know, that the state might fairly enforce against the parent his responsibility, or that it might separate his children from him, if it were obliged to assume his duties on account of his worthlessness. On the contrary, such a view of the matter is almost always met with an outcry against inhumanity. Perhaps such an outcry is just; but what I maintain is, that if we are not prepared to interfere in any way at all with freedom of marriage or the continuance of family life between two people who are not fit to be parents, then our plans of throwing all the consequences on the good parents is a policy by which society continually uses up its best members, while it preserves and stimulates the reproduction of its bad ones.
Let us go on with some details and see if this is not so.
The children, being here, must be educated. Plainly, it belongs to the parent to educate them. In contemplating marriage a man is just as much bound to look forward to the expense of educating as of feeding his children. If the state—that is, again, his neighbors—will have to educate his children for him, one important link in the chain of moral responsibility that is essential to the moral order of society is broken. I know of no provision at all for bringing home to parents the duty of educating their children, or the value of education to their children; on the contrary, all the existing arrangements offer education as a thing to be taken or left by those for whom it is intended. Compulsory attendance is making some advance; but here again, where liberty has no application, we are met with an outcry in favor of
