The advocates of Eugenics are prepared for small beginnings but they have enormous faith in its future. There is no desire and no need to exaggerate the present tentative claims. To the many it is still necessary to ask for the intellectual hospitality of impartial consideration. Even to the convinced we only appeal for judicious experiment. To the religious our work comes as a harmonious exercise of the best with which the Eternal Will of the Universe has endowed us.
To the evolutionist Eugenics represents the study and expression of Nature's plan. To the humane our work appeals as it assures mankind of a curtailment of human suffering. We lay new laurels on graves of the honoured dead and write new epitaphs glorifying the ancestors of the worthy living. We reverence the cradle containing the hope of the race, we think of past and present as the womb of the future.
Maternity Maintenance, or State Subventions to Mothers
MEDICAL ATTENDANCE
First and foremost comes the need for qualified medical and nursing attendance on the mother and the newly born infant. At present many mothers go almost unattended in their hour of need; many tens of thousands more have attendance that comes too late, or is quite inadequately qualified; hundreds of thousands of others fail to get the nursing and home assistance that is required to prevent long-continued suffering and ill-health to mothers and children alike. The local health authorities ought to be required to provide within its area qualified medical attendance, including all necessary nursing, for all cases of child-birth of which it has received due notice. There is no reason why this should not be done as a measure of public health, free of charge to the patient, in the same way as vaccination is provided for all who do not object to that operation; and on the same principle that led to the gratuitous opening of the hospitals, to any person suffering from particular diseases quite irrespective of his means. What is, however, important is that the necessary medical attendance and nursing shall always be provided. If the community prefers to recover the cost from such patients as can clearly afford to pay—say, for instance, those having incomes above a prescribed amount—instead of from everybody in the form of rates and taxes, this (as with the payment for admission to an isolation hospital) may be an intermediate stage. In one way or another, there must be no child-birth without adequate attendance and help to the mother.