If we find that many people are living without the comforts they need and in conditions inimical to health and morality, we can at least take comfort in the fact that fewer go to the "poorhouse" than used to be found there when all sorts of dependents were sent to that one institution.

With the state's new discrimination and graded assorting of young and old and sick and well and sane and insane and normal and subnormal, the state care is on lines at once more humane to the individual and more helpful to social organization.
The state is indeed turning father and mother in its newer agencies for social conservation and social aid to the distressed and miserable.

And as the state thus does the work that once was attempted and poorly done by the collective family, it must more and more call to its service the men and women of parental quality and of fit and devoted expression of the protective and the nurturing elements of human nature.
=Social Service in Peace.=--The state has always called for sacrificial service from its members.

It has called most of all for such sacrificial service when danger seemed to threaten the national existence, or enemies of the government lifted treasonable intent against the peace and order to which the majority of citizens were devoted.

Now we are called upon, if only we can realize the new claims upon the higher patriotism, to make the country we love what all countries should be, a home of freedom, of mutual helpfulness, of economic well-being and of incorrupt and progressive political order.
It has been said and truly, "The ideas of great men are apprehended slowly, and a free and rational society must in part exist before the dream of such a society can be interpreted." We have a dream of a free, a noble, a competent, a happy people in our America.