The Children's Bureau.—Our government at Washington used to be limited in its function to those political services which no state organization could accomplish by itself, but now the Federal departments are busily at work setting standards, if only through authentic information and suggestion, which aim to raise the average life in all directions, economic and social. The Children's Bureau is preëminently a standardizing body, although with no power to issue or enforce decrees. The Bureaus which have to do with foods and animal life and farm management are setting higher and higher levels of attainment for the common people in their home life and in their vocational work. There is a strong movement to enlarge the educational influence at the very heart of our national government with a Cabinet Head to set a high standard of attainment in both the art, the science, and the administration of education as well as to aid in equalizing educational opportunity. Moreover, there is a strong tendency, seen most recently and vividly in the provisions of the Maternity Aid Bill, for all social efforts to ask and to be granted Federal financial aid on the fifty-fifty plan. There is not a consensus of opinion among the thoughtful as to the wisdom of thus placing upon the general government the burden of social schemes upon which a minority of the people, be that minority large or small, are alone agreed. The force of persuasion may secure national legislation in advance of that which many local communities already have or are seeking to secure. The increase of national power through the work of national officials is not deemed politically sound by some persons who favor specific action by the states alone in such matters as maternity aid. The tendency is, however, a proof of two things, one that we are as a people becoming a nation; that is more a centralized and united governmental force—and the other that more and more people are trying in every way to secure a more uniform as well as a higher standard of living for all our citizens.

A Women's Lobby at the National Capitol.—It is said that the most powerful lobby in Washington is "the Public Welfare Lobby backed by seven million organized American women." This lobby is composed of representatives of the following organizations of women with number of members estimated as indicated:

National League of Women Voters2,000,000
General Federation of Women's Clubs2,000,000
Women's Christian Temperance Union500,000
National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations310,000
National Women's Trade Union League600,000
Daughters of the American Revolution200,000
American Home Economics Association1,800
National Consumers' League(No number given)
American Association of University Women16,000
National Council of Jewish Women50,000
Girls' Friendly Society52,000
Young Women's Christian Association560,000
National Federation of Business and Professional Women40,000
Women's League for Peace and Freedom2,500

This represents a formidable influence upon public affairs, one that may do some harm along with much good, unless it goes to school to social facts and balances its social sympathy (already shown in such alert attention to the needs of the weaker and younger portion of the nation) with sober and sane understanding of the difficulty of getting progress in any line unless a majority of the people are unitedly in favor of it and willing to sacrifice something in order to secure it.

There are signs already that among the leaders of women in the new organization of Women Voters there is a feeling that the pendulum may swing too far toward philanthropic measures, for some of which the general public is as yet unprepared. The call is already made for more concentration upon the better enforcement of existing laws, rather than upon constant demand for new legislation in the interest of social welfare.

Women's Interest in Public Life a Social Asset.—The fact, however, that so many women are actively engaged not only in watching legislation and in learning the character and ability of political leaders in the national Congress, but also in trying to raise the average life of the people of the country by and through better laws and more efficient enforcement, is cause for great encouragement. It shows that women came into their kingdom of political power just as the state was ready to take on the functions no longer fully expressed within the family circle. If we must be shocked by learning that a baby a day is being given away in New York City through advertisements in the daily papers, and with a haste and carelessness that proves lack of responsibility in parents and guardians, we may be relieved of fear that love of children is dying out when we see what are the things that millions of women are now banded together to secure for the betterment of all child-life. Largely owing to such efforts, fewer babies die during the first year of life now in any listed one hundred thousand, than ever before in our American history. 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. We must be careful at every point lest by carelessness of political forms or lack of understanding of what those forms should be, we hinder the development of that free and rational society in which the noblest thoughts and highest ideals of the best and finest of our leaders can alone find root and grow.

Problems Voters Must Solve.—Three special problems are before the voters of our country, problems commanding in importance and not easy of solution. They are, first, the problem which inheres in our union of States, with their wide divergence of climate, soil, industries, population, standards of action and ideals of national and local action. The problem is this: what shall we decide is the measure of wise and useful division between the laws and conditions we shall make national in extent of social control and in practical functioning of political administration, and those of smaller autonomous units? What shall belong to the Federal Government and make field for its activity? What shall belong to the various States and make up their separate systems of law and administration? And what shall be left to each locality, or each county of each State, for its own political activity? These are not easy questions to answer, and the constant movement toward centralization of power, not only of standardization but of control in the National Government (a movement which received such an immense impetus during the war), is likely to make this a movable problem of differing answers as our nation grows older. The division of States may give a geographical symbol of deep inherent differences of background of culture and even of race, or that division may mean only a superficial mark of geographic outline between two sets of communities alike in all their inheritance and tendency. In any case, how much weight shall still be attached to "States Rights," and how much shall we press for a uniform life throughout all the land? What shall be the special duties of each local community toward its common needs of education, of recreation, of moral protection, and social order? How much in any given place shall the tendency of neighbors to be unwilling to testify against each other when wrong-doing is practised, and unable to withstand any evil influence when near the centre of its working, lead us to unite in demanding a larger unit for the Juvenile Court or the enforcement of laws against commercialized vice or any other social concern where justice demands a free hand and no favor to any group? These are questions with which some of our volunteer agencies of social work have wrestled. The answers that wise and good people have made to them should have weight in any decision we may make as to the right and effective divisions of law and its enforcement in our American system. This problem of division of authority has within it a puzzling counter-interpretation of our original Constitution and of our history up to date. The doctrine of "States Rights," it is said, received its death blow in the Civil War, but the equal political and civil rights of the negro, which that war was supposed to establish as a national concern, vary with the varying attitudes of people of the different states toward the enforcement of the Constitutional Amendments which were intended to secure those rights. The Southern States, it is said, still stand for the dignity and autonomy of each Commonwealth in matters of restriction upon labor and of provision for tax-supported education, but the inner stronghold of the Federal Prohibition Amendment is the section of the country south of Mason and Dixon's line. The new States, again it is said, are more tenacious of national centralization of government because more evidently drawing their powers from the federal centre, but in the valley of the Mississippi from north to south,—that section which promises to have the determination of the course of American history in its hands for the next hundred years,—there are signs that the state autonomy and the state jealousy of invasion of local authority in the interest of national conformity to federal law are not by any means unknown. There should be some more carefully outlined and more commonly understood principles of judgment to lead us to decisions, when a thing we believe it good to do or a law we desire to set in place and in operation call upon us for support, as to the best way of using that support. Whether to try for a federal amendment or a national statute, whether to work wholly within each State, or whether it is matter which so depends upon local sentiment and local coöperation that each smallest community centre must work out its own salvation, or secure its own advance in independent work,—this is the problem.

Comparison Between National and Local Effort.—One reason why some elements of social progress lag behind others which are not more firmly believed in is that confusion of effort has followed the contrary forms of attack upon the national, the state, or the local governments for the furtherance of the object in which all parties believe. Instances are not needed in this connection for every person who has worked or who desires to work for social betterment finds this question at the gateway of organized effort. Shall one turn to the centralizing tendency in political life of our country for support of a given measure, or shall one make a breakwater in that tendency and concentrate attention upon the smaller political units?