is outside the community is but a survival in another form of that antiquated notion which compelled Louis XIV to declare “L’Etat c’est moi!” A State which admits that the individuals composing it are incompetent to perform their own most sacred and intimate functions, and takes upon itself to perform them instead, attempts a task which would be undesirable, even if it were possible of achievement.  It must always be remembered that a State which proposes to relieve its constituent members of their natural functions and responsibilities attempts something quite different from the State which seeks to aid its members to fulfil their own biological and social functions more adequately.  A State which enables its mothers to rest when they are child-bearing is engaged in a reasonable task; a State which takes over its mothers’ children is reducing philanthropy to absurdity.  It is easy to realize this if we consider the inevitable course of circumstances under a system of “State-nurseries.”  The child would be removed from its natural mother at the earliest age, but some one has to perform the mother’s duties; the substitute must therefore be properly trained for such duties; and in exercising them under favorable circumstances a maternal relationship is developed between the child and the “mother,” who doubtless possesses natural maternal instincts but has no natural maternal bond to the child she is mothering.  Such a relationship tends to become on both sides practically and emotionally the real relationship.  We very often have opportunity of seeing how unsatisfactory such a relationship becomes.  The artificial mother is deprived of a child she had begun to feel her own; the child’s emotional relationships are upset, split and distorted; the real mother has the bitterness of feeling that for her child she is not the real mother.  Would it not have been much better for all if the State had encouraged the vast army of women it had trained for the position of mothering other women’s children, to have, instead, children of their own?  The women who are incapable of mothering their own children could then be trained to refrain from bearing them.

Ellen Key (in her Century of the Child, and elsewhere) has advocated for all young women a year of compulsory “service,” analogous to the compulsory military service imposed in most countries on young men.  During this period the girl would be trained in rational housekeeping, in the principles of hygiene, in the care of the sick, and especially in the care of infants and all that concerns the physical and psychic development of children.  The principle of this proposal has since been widely accepted.  Marie von Schmid (in her Mutterdienst, 1907) goes so far as to advocate a general training of young women in such duties, carried on in a kind of enlarged and improved midwifery school.  The service would last a year, and the young woman would then be for three years in the reserves, and liable