LET US PENSION THE MOTHERS.
I was attending a conference to consider the best steps to be taken to aid mothers and to stop the sacrifice of the lives and health of little children. All kinds of suggestions were made. We talked much, we proposed and discussed, but none of us seemed able to agree what ought to be done.
Then a strong man, an observant lawyer, rose. He spoke with the biting American twang. His words were few: “Why don’t you pay poor mothers?”
The brilliant simplicity of this question stirred at once our powers of understanding.
It was Judge Neil who spoke. In brief phrases he told us what had been done in America. Mother’s pensions, which are in reality children’s pensions, have been established in most of the forty-eight States of the Union. They are granted until the children are fourteen, or, in the case of delicate children, until sixteen. State-appointed supervisors watch over the welfare of the children to ensure that the money given is well spent by the mother.
As Judge Neil placed the facts before us, this plan of paying mothers instead of forcing them to go out as workers, possibly at “sweated” wages, and then paying other people in an institution to do their work, seemed so simple that I was filled with wonder that we had not long ago thought of so easy and obvious a reform. It is strange that it is so often the most simple things that we never think of doing. I believe it is because we think of reforms intellectually; we are not human enough to feel.
Now, it is just Judge Neil’s humanity that set his feet upon the right way. Listen to the story of how first he came to think of mother’s pensions:—
In 1911, a poor widow, broken by the burden of supporting her family, was condemned to have all her five children taken from her.
“Better to shoot her than take away her children.” said Judge Neil. He then asked how much it would cost to maintain the children in a State institution.
“The country pays the institution 10 dollars a month for each child,” was the answer.
“Why not give the 10 dollars to the mother and let her keep her children?”
Such was Judge Neil’s humane and practical solution of the problem. Thus the scheme for pensioning mothers was born.
The responsibility of the State for children ill-cared-for is admitted in most countries. It is, therefore, a question of ways and means, not a question of high principle, how best to carry out this intention and prevent child poverty.
Surely grants to good mothers are better than grants to institutions. Even the best Poor Law schools must have the faults that are inherent in institutions.
I can hardly express too strongly my own want of faith in “expert child-trainers.” I have found always that they regard the child mainly, if not entirely, as something to be improved and instructed on a definite plan. The “expert” is never human, and a child has need of all the human treatment it can get.
Every child has absolute need of its mother. All experience shows us that the home, with its sympathetic relationships of mother and child, sisters and brothers, cannot be replaced. We must insist on reforms that will make home life possible.
The child has to accept the arrangements we make; that is why this question is of such immense importance. If the matter could be fixed by the will of the children I should have no fear. The child has not lost the true values of life.
There is another fact to consider—one that will appeal to ratepayers. Grants to mothers are cheaper than grants to institutions. In the United States the payment made to a mother works out at about one-third the cost of maintaining a child in an institution. So we can do the best thing for the child and its mother and at the same time save our pockets.