Is it not true? Even now along with the war’s destruction of life on the most colossal scale known to history, children throughout the world are dying at a rate that equals the military losses. In England a hundred thousand babies under one year of age and a hundred thousand more that do not succeed in getting born are lost annually. In America our infant mortality is 300,000 a year. In Germany it is half a million babies who die annually. The economics of the situation to a woman is not obscure. Conservation of the children we already have, is the advice of the real specialist in repopulation. One other suggestion she contributes. She has made it practically unanimously in all lands. In the Prussian Diet House it was one speaking with authority as the mother of eight who interpolated: “Meine Herren, if you would induce women to bring more children into the world you must make life easier for mothers.” “Messieurs, Messieurs,” called the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes to the Société pour la Vie with its curious proposal of money grants in reward to fathers of large families, “to get children, you must cultivate mothers!” “Gentlemen,” declared the Duchess of Marlborough at a great public meeting on race renewal held in the Guild Hall, London, “care of the nation’s motherhood is the war measure that will safeguard the future of the state.”
These amendments in birth politics offered on behalf of the Most Important Person have been practically adopted the world over. Chancellors of the Exchequer are everywhere busy writing off expenditures from the taxes running into millions, in support of nation-wide campaigns for the conservation of the child. Maternity from now on in every land takes the status of a protected industry. Britain is ready to devote two and one-half million dollars a year to schools for mothers. France has voted a “wards of the nation” bill, to provide for the care of 700,000 war orphans, at a cost to the state which it is estimated will mean an outlay of two hundred million dollars. Public provisions for motherhood and infancy are proceeding apace with provisions for the armies. If you are going to have a baby in Nottingham, England, a public health visitor comes round to see that you are perfectly comfortable and quite all right. And the municipality that is thus anxiously watching over your welfare solicitously inquires through a printed blank on which the reply is to be recorded, “Have you two nightgowns?” In Berlin large signs at the subway and elevated stations direct you to institutions where rates are moderate, or even the Kaiser himself will be glad to pay the bill. Similar facilities are offered by the government of France in the “Guide des Services Gratuits Protegeant la Maternite,” with which the walls of Paris are placarded. Even the war baby, whose cry for attention not all the ecclesiastical councils and the military tribunals commanding “Hush” has been able to still, at last is too valuable to be lost. And every Parliament has arranged to extend the nation’s protection on practically equal terms to all children, not excluding those we have called “illegitimate,” because somebody before them has broken a law.
FINANCING MATERNITY
You see, yesterday only a mother counted her jewels. To-day states count them too. Even Jimmie Smith in, we will say, England, who before the war might have been regarded as among the least of these little ones, has become the object of his country’s concern. Jimmie came screaming into this troublous world in a borough of London’s East End, where there were already so many people that you didn’t seem to miss Jimmie’s father and some of the others who had gone to the war. Jimmie belongs to one of those 300,000 London families who are obliged to live in one and two room tenements. Five or six, perhaps it was five, little previous brothers and sisters waited on the stair landing outside the door until the midwife in attendance ushered them in to welcome the new arrival. Now Jimmie is the stuff from which soldiers are made, either soldiers of war or soldiers of industry. And however you look at the future, his country’s going to need Jimmie. He is entered in the great new ledger which has been opened by his government. The Notification of Births Act, completed by Parliament in 1915, definitely put the British baby on a business basis. Every child must now, within thirty-six hours of its advent, be listed by the local health authorities. Jimmie was.
And he was thereby automatically linked up with the great national child saving campaign. Since then, so much as a fly in his milk is a matter of solicitude to the borough council. If he sneezes, it’s heard in Westminster. And it’s at least worried about there. Though all the King’s councillors and all the King’s men don’t yet quite know what they’re to do with the many problems of infancy and complications of pregnancy with which they are confronted, now that these are matters for state attention.
A first and most natural conclusion that they reached, as equally has been the case in other lands, was that the illness of babies was due to the ignorance of mothers. Well, some of it is. And that has proven a very good place to begin. For every one else, from a plumber to a professor, there has always been training. Only a mother was supposed to find out how by herself. Now she no longer has to. The registration of Jimmie’s birth itself brought the Health Visitor, detailed from the public health department of the borough, for her first municipal call on his mother. She found Mrs. Smith up and trying to make gruel for herself. After serious expostulation, the maternity patient was induced to return to bed, where she belonged. Gruel, the white-faced woman who sank back on the pillow insisted, was easy. Why, probably she should not have minded it at all. Only that day before yesterday she had gotten up to do a bit of wash and had fainted at the tub. She hadn’t seemed to be just right since. Neither had the baby.
The visitor leaned across the bed and removed a “pacifier” from the baby’s mouth. “But he has to have it,” said the mother, “he cries so much. All my children had it.” Looking round at them, the visitor saw that it was true. Each exhibited some form of the facial malformation that substantiated the statement. And one was deaf from the adenoid growth. And one was not quite bright. This was, of course, no time for a medical lecture beyond Mrs. Smith’s comprehension. But the effort was made to impress her with the simple statement of fact that a pacifier really was harmful for a child. There were inquiries about the baby’s feeding. No, of course, it was not being done scientifically. Well, the mother was told, if he were fed at regular intervals he would be in better condition not to cry all the time. And of course she herself must not get tired. It was Mrs. Smith’s first introduction to the practice of mothercraft as an art. At the school for mothers recently opened in the next square, where the Health Visitor had her enrolled within a month, her regular instruction began.
The schools for mothers are now being established as rapidly as possible throughout the country. It is not an absolutely new enterprise. The first one in England, from which all the others are being copied, had been started in London by an American woman who had married an Englishman, Mrs. Alys Russell, a graduate of Bryn Mawr. Women recognised at once the value of the plan. It was only a question of popularising and paying for it. This the war has accomplished. Government will now defray 50 per cent. of the cost of a school under the operation of either voluntary agencies or borough authorities. Already 800 schools have been opened. Some of the most successful are at Birmingham, Sheffield and Glasgow, under municipal direction. Parliament, you see, by financing it has established the school for mothers as a national institution.
The “infant consultation” is the feature about which its activities centre. Jimmie was taken regularly for the doctor’s inspection and advice and there is on file there at the school a comprehensive record in which is entered every fact of his family history and environment and his own physical condition, with the phenomena of its changes from week to week. The weekly weighing indicated very accurately his progress. And the week that his weary mother’s milk failed, the scales reported it. The modified milk was carefully prescribed but the next week’s weighing indicated that Mrs. Smith wasn’t getting the ingredients together right. The Health Visitor was assigned to go home with her and show her just how. Like that, Jimmie was constantly supervised. When the doctor at the consultation, tapping the little distended abdomen with skilled fingers, announced, “This baby is troubled with colic,” Mrs. Smith said he had been having it a good deal lately. Well, a little questioning corrected the difficulty. The trouble was pickles, and he never had them after that. Also he never had the summer complaint, which the former Smith babies always had in September.
You see, there is no proper cupboard at Jimmie’s house. There is only the recess beside the chimney, and flies come straight from the manure heap at the back of the house to the milk pitcher on the shelf. Mrs. Smith didn’t know that flies mattered. She knows now, and at the school she has learned that you protect the baby from summer complaint by covering the pitcher with a muslin cloth. She also has learned how to make the most ingenious cradle that ever was contrived. It’s constructed from a banana box, but it perfectly well serves the purpose for which it was designed. That Jimmie should sleep alone, is one of the primary directions at the school. Of course, it is clear that this is hygienically advisable, and there is another reason: these crowded London areas are so crowded that even the one bed the family usually possesses is also overcrowded. With some five other children occupying it with their mother, there was danger that Jimmie would some night be smothered. “Overlaying,” as it is called, is the reason assigned in the death certificate for the loss of a good many London babies.