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If I had but the art, I might portray for you here a drama which would grip you and hold you with a bond firmer than Hamlet, the great tragedy. I mean this deeper and more soul‐stirring conception, the tragedy of the unmarried mother. But that task is not for me. The deep and throbbing human quality of this problem you must construct each for himself out of the compass of your own sympathies, out of the depths of your own personality. My effort shall be only the dry demonstration of a proposition in logic.

Who is the unmarried mother? What does the fact of her maternity mean to human society? What, if anything, must society do to safeguard its own well‐being with reference to her case? Let us take up these questions in order.

I. Who is the unmarried mother? She may be‐‐and in most cases is‐‐that slatternly, hangdog individual, a child in years with physical maturity, a mind dull and incompetent; capable of a dog‐like instinct of affection groping with the inexorable impulses of Nature toward maternity, unable to foresee consequences or their social impropriety.

Or she may be‐‐and often is‐‐that vivacious, vain excitement‐loving girl‐‐that person of the extreme styles, the very high heels, the very short skirts, making continual display of such physical features as she thinks will awaken the brute; wearing expensive clothes and enjoying costly entertainment by virtue of her prostitution. Her extreme imaginatory development overawes the many womanly instincts which she really possesses and drives her on to satisfy her vanity by trading her virtue. Maternity with her is an accident, a failure in her means of prevention. She is a psychopath.

Or she may be that queenly woman in ten thousand, beautiful in mind and body, stirred to the depth of her being with the deepest passion of life‐‐the love of a man. And the man has abused her trust.

Unmarried mothers are of infinite variety, but they may be grouped for purposes of our discussion under these three well‐known types.

II. What does the fact of her maternity mean to society? Let me call to your mind the basic concept of this society of ours. The advance of civilization may be epitomized in a simple picture:

It is that of the hearthstone, at one side the man, strong in mind and body, alert, fearless, affording willing protection and support to his family; on the other side, the woman, wife to this man and mother to his children, a well‐grown female possessed of all her physical powers, unimpaired by the benumbing practices of short nights, unsuitable diet and inappropriate dress, which so‐called social conventions prescribe‐‐a person of discernment versed in the mystery of childbirth and the upbringing of children. And grouped about these two, their children, at least three in number, sound and wholesome, giving promise of becoming, with parental care, at least a degree better in physical quality and mental capabilities than the pair from which they sprang.

This cycle of the nest and its nestlings, carried out to infinity, represents the steady march of mankind toward his highest plane of natural development. It is the vehicle by which civilization progresses.

What then does it mean to society when the father of the new child is not identified or the parents cannot be brought to yield nurture and protection to their young? What does it mean to overthrow the family hearth and to throw into the world a little child to fend largely for himself by means which will surely handicap him in the race for competent manhood?

We must be careful what we say about this case of the illegitimate. Let us begin with a first principle: The natural purpose of life, from the lowest forms to the highest, is procreation. For mankind, his most natural function and at the same time his most sacred aim, is the begetting and the rearing of his young.

Nature is not necessarily outraged by the begetting of an illegitimate child. The absence of a man‐made ceremony of the marriage contract concerns her little, if at all. She wants a child. In terms of the stock farm it must be a good standing foal. She is not offended if there be no ceremony. But she is stung to the quick by incestuous combinations which tend to weak or bad hereditary characters; or by the mating of stock so badly diseased that its offspring is imperfect and weak; and she will take dreadful vengeance therefor. Her magic wand is heredity, and with it she can make and unmake at will. If the auspices are favorable, she will beget a Venus or a Doriphoros of Policlytes; if they be against, there comes forth the' horrible Quasimodo, that bell‐ringer of Notre Dame, or the hundreds of twisted crawling creatures in the congenital syphilitic wards of our hospitals. Sterility, welcomed by a perverted social set as a blessing, is for Nature the supreme curse, for by it she has terminated the line.

What then is the meaning of marriage? Monogamy is undoubtedly the form of sex relationship which has worn best in human experience. Man, cringing at the punishments of outraged Nature, has found his safest course a code of practice by which one man shall unite in family life with but one woman at one time; that the world shall know, through the ceremony of marriage, that they are so mated; that they shall be responsible to the world for the begetting and the upbringing of children; and that those children shall have the right to their parents' protection and their good name among men. This I take to be the significance of marriage in terms of Nature's laws.

Man handles the job badly. We marry offhand, and from impulse rather than reason, even though marriage as an institution rests upon eugenic reasoning as its justification. If we as a race are content to let Nature hack and hew her way upward, producing a thousand failures for one success‐‐sowing anguish and misery broadcast, it does not matter much whether we follow the law of the jungle. If we believe in bending every effort toward the alleviation of man's condition and toward the improvement of his physical and mental equipment for the development of a better spiritual life, then we must look to the family as our instrument and to its development as the measure of our success.

III. Passing to the third phase of our inquiry, what should society do to protect herself? If our aim is to guarantee to the child parental care and the protection of the fireside, our course in the case of the illegitimate, where some factors essential to that care are lacking, is to seize upon those which are present and make the best of them. The love and affection necessary to found the family hearth are seldom present in both parents of the illegitimate. The father, if known at all, is frequently already obligated for the care and nurture of one brood, and if not he is in many cases an immature youth, with few of the possibilities of citizenship in him. The mother is as I have said, a defective in most cases, of abnormal mentality in many instances and there is but a small residue of the strong woman able physically and mentally.

This much is clear, however. Society is never justified in depriving the child of its mother's milk and its mother's care wherever retaining the infant with its mother is not an obvious danger to its welfare. We cannot discuss butter fats when we consider mother's milk. I tell you there is a moral quality in that precious fluid‐‐not known to chemistry. If the mother is reasonably competent, she is the best person to look after her child. And that duty enforced upon her, with the consequent upspringing of maternal love is the best possible social corrective for her. To keep them together is in accordance with the demands of Nature. To separate them is an offence against Nature. Leaving out of account those instances of feeble‐mindedness or disease where mother and baby cannot be kept together, it is not too much to say that the connivance of the church, the public official or the charitable agency at the separation of mother and baby in order as they say “to cover up the disgrace" is an evil‐smelling offence against the public good and should be made a crime. Illegitimacy should in itself‐‐as in our newest laws it does‐‐constitute a crime against society; not because it offends our moral sense, but because it impairs the foundation of society‐‐the family. And who so would conspire with the illegitimate parent to lessen the chances of that infant still further, should be held to be an accessory after the fact.

I am striking at a few of you here present perhaps‐‐but doubtless in that case you deserve it.

If you stop to think of it you must realize that in a case of bastardy the true parties in interest are not the mother and the alleged father, as has been assumed for ages in Anglo‐Saxon law‐‐but rather the public and the child. A crime has been committed against society by two persons, the father and the mother of the new born child. Society is, therefore, the natural complainant. It has been victimized. And how about the baby? It has been deprived of its birthright, marked as an exception in society, with a status to which the Pharisee and the Sadducee attach stigma and contempt.

He also must be a party in interest. He has a right to exact from those unmarried parents the full measure of protection accorded to the legitimate child. The father owes him the duty to support him in his minority. The mother owes him the duty of nursing and upbringing. He is helpless, and his co‐complainant, society, must be his next friend. Society has the right to demand self‐support and competence of every individual. But it cannot exact such a standard from the fatherless, homeless illegitimate without standing with him in his claim for such protection as his victimized status makes possible.

In all future statutes for the care of illegitimates, therefore, the act is likely to be treated as a crime, and the parents held rigidly to the same obligations as married parents.

To accomplish these results, which I have indicated thus far, I believe that the following steps are immediately necessary:

1. More serious and more effective effort to get the A. B. C. of the social program into the minds of the public, by more intelligent publicity. 2. Unremitting insistence upon the segregation (or sterilization if the public prefers to do it that way) of every unmistakably feeble‐minded girl of child‐bearing age‐‐at least those of known defective heredity. 3. Provision in our statutes by which the state, representing society, shall stand in loco parentis to every illegitimate child, by the mere fact of illegitimacy, with full power to enforce upon the parents the full obligations of parenthood. 4. The immediate passage of a law in our New England States requiring notice by the clerk of court to the state authorities immediately upon the filing of a bastardy action and the making of the state a party to the action thereby, without whose consent and approval the case cannot be disposed of.