Some believe that the future of this population depends solely on the attention paid to the development of the resources of the coast. Not only are its raw products more needed than ever, but even supposing that unscientific handling of them has depleted the supply, still there is ample to maintain a larger population than at present. This can only be when science and capital are introduced here, combined with an educated manhood fired by the spirit of coöperation.
In large parts of China a famine to wipe out surplus population is apparently a periodical necessity. An orphanage in India for similar reasons does not seem to be as rationally economic as one for the Labrador children. I never see a cliff face from which an avalanche has removed the supersoil and herbage without thinking in pity of the crowded sections of China, where tearing up even the roots of trees for fuel has permitted so much arable land to be denuded by rains that the food supply gets smaller while the population grows larger.
The future of all medical work depends on whether people want it and can arrange to get it paid for. If all the world become Christian Scientists, scientific—which we believe to be also Christian—healing will everywhere die a natural death—and possibly the people also. But history suggests that the healing art is one of considerable vitality. My own belief is that in the apparently approaching socialistic age, medicine will be communized and provided by the State free to all. If education for the mind is, why not education for the body?
Certain subtle and very vital psychic influences are probably the best stock in trade of the "Doctor of the old school." These qualities appear at present less likely to be "had for hire" in a Government official. The Chinese may yet return the missionary compliment by teaching us to adopt their method of paying the doctor only when and as long as the patient is cured.
Out of the taxes, the major part of which is paid by the people of the outport districts in this Colony, the Government provides free medical aid in the Capital, presumably because those who have the spending of the money mostly reside there. The Mission provides it in the farthest off and poorest part of the country, Labrador and North Newfoundland, because there is no chance whatever at present for the poor people to obtain it otherwise. Our pro rata share of the taxes, if judged by the paltry Government grant toward the work, would not provide anything worth having. The people here pay far better in proportion to their ability for hospital privileges than they do in Boston or London; the Government pays a little, and the rest comes from the loving gifts of those who desire nothing better, when they know of real need, than to make sacrifices to meet it.
One feels that the Chinese and Japanese and all nations will be able some day to pay for their own doctors, whether they do it on individualistic or communistic principles. In the present state of the world I believe the missionary enterprise to be entirely desirable, or I would not be where I am. But being a Christian with a little faith, I hope that it may not be so forever. If anything will stimulate to better methods, it is example, not precept, and perhaps the best work of this and all missions will be their reflex influences on Governments through the governed.
To carry on the bare essentials of this work an endowment of at least a million dollars is necessary. Toward this a hundred and sixty thousand dollars is all that has been contributed, and in addition we can count annually upon a small Government grant. Even if this million dollars were given, it would still leave several thousand dollars to be raised by voluntary subscription each year, a healthy thing for the life of any charitable work. On the other hand, the certainty of being able to meet the main bills is an economy in nerve energy, in time and in money.
Among our patients brought in one season to St. Anthony Hospital was the mother of ten children on whom an emergency operation for appendicitis had to be done—the first time in her life that a doctor had ever tended her. She came from a very poor home, for besides her large family her husband had been all his life handicapped by a serious deformity of one leg caused by a fall. She reminded me of how some years before a traveller had left her the rug from his dog sledge, as, without any bedclothes, she was again about to give birth to a child; how she had actually been unable at times to turn over in bed, because her personal clothing had frozen solid to the wall of the one-roomed hut in which she lived.
In April, 1906, in northern Newfoundland I found a young mother near St. Anthony. She was twenty-six years old, suffering from acute rheumatic fever, lying in a fireless loft, on a rickety bedstead with no bedclothes. She had only one shoddy black dress to her name, and no underwear to keep her warm in bed in a house like that. The floor was littered with débris, including a number of hard buns which she could not now eat, but which some charitable neighbour had sent her. She had a wizened baby of seven months, which every now and then she was trying to feed by raising herself on one elbow and forcing bread and water pap, moistened with the merest suspicion of condensed milk, down its throat. None of her four previous children had lived so long. She had been under my care three years before for sailor's scurvy. Her present illness lasted only a week, and in spite of all that we could do, she died.
The desire of the people to be mutually helpful is undoubted, whether it is to each other or to some "outsider" like ourselves. I question if in the so-called centres of civilization the following incident can be surpassed as evidencing this aspect of their character.