There is a very good story, which belongs to your own Dr. Hurty. I do not know whether you all know it, or whether I dare tell it, but I will presume that this audience is largely made up of visitors, and steal his story. In this State, Dr. Hurty is authority for saying there was a farmer who had a ne’er-do-well son and a granddaughter, and when the farmer came to die he wished to leave the farm to the granddaughter, but he left the use of it to the son until the granddaughter should arrive at the age of twenty-one. When the girl, as she thought, was twenty-one, she claimed her inheritance, but the other side said she was only nineteen. She went to the Bible, where her name was written down, but the leaf was torn out, and the court was very much perplexed. It came to be a serious legal question, and finally a neighbor recollected that the grandfather had had a very remarkable calf born on the same day with this little girl, and he said he knew the farm books kept by the grandfather would record this pedigree. So the farm books were looked up and the birth of the calf was discovered and the birth of the girl was established. (Laughter.) You all remember how George Bernard Shaw warns us against placing confidence in the deus ex machina. He says you cannot presume on things being some miraculous way you would like them to be, and so we cannot presume on grandfathers always keeping herds of cattle. (Applause.)
I am perfectly sure, as I have said before, as I had the honor of saying over at San Francisco before the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, that if the women of America wanted birth registration they would get it in a twelvemonth. Now, it sounds so very remote from putting down the baby’s name in the book.
In the State of Indiana you have a very good law, Dr. Hurty tells me, and all that is necessary is for the women of Indiana to say that they want the names when their children are born recorded in the public records of Indiana. In 1910, when the last census was taken, all that we know about the births in this country was what we learned from eight States, the New England States, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Not your State, or mine, Illinois, was deemed worthy to be considered at all. So far as the general government was concerned, for anything it knew, nobody had been born in either of these States in ten years. In the next census year, I hope very much in a great many States in this country, perhaps in all the States in this country, we shall be able to be recognized by the general government as having been born and as having been born very accurately, so that we will be worthy to be counted, as much so as if we lived in Boston and Massachusetts, which, they are always telling us, are the most accurate State and city.
Of course, the Bureau cares for a great many things besides the registration of births, but I hope I have made it plain that we should ask that we be allowed to get a method of acquiring steady, constant and reliable means of legal proof as to the children who enter this Nation, because it is the dignified basis for a governmental Bureau, which I believe is destined to grow to proportions which none of us can measure, which shall continue long after all of us are gone. No other bureau in the world makes so tremendous an appeal to the emotions and sentiment—a children’s bureau, a bureau to concern itself with the life and happiness of the children of a great nation, and the more appealing it is, the more must it be founded upon facts which will bear the very closest scientific scrutiny. What the Bureau will be doing years from now I do not know. I know what it must do now. The law is very distinct about some of the things it must do, and by implication many of the things it cannot do. It is a bureau to gather information and to publish it as the secretary of the department under which it exists may direct. It can publish in any way which the secretary deems best. There are a great many different ways of publishing facts. We are learning to publish facts through the sort of thing you have in the State House here and other exhibits, through the appeal to the eye. In this way thousands of those who cannot study very carefully or cannot read a table to save their lives may understand, and I hope it is with some of the simpler methods of popularizing things that this Bureau may begin to make itself useful.
The Bureau, although it is a different type from all the other work of the government in a certain sense, after all, is not so isolated as we might think. There is a Bureau of Labor, which has studied much the labor of women and children. There is the Census Bureau, of which I have spoken. There is the Bureau of Immigration and of Education, and the Bureau in the Department of Agriculture, which has concerned itself very much in the South with those very interesting and productive efforts for better farming, which have begun their activities by stimulating tomato-canning among the girls. All of these things, part of them purely educational, part of them a matter of direct work, are things which we shall not do over again, from which we hope to learn very much.
There have been a good many anxieties about this Bureau, many people have thought it was a mistake. Some people have said, “Ah, well, you are going to center everything about children away off there in Washington where there will be a government with a lot of very comfortable clerks sitting about in offices and writing down figures about children instead of doing things for children and you will palsy local effort.” If the Bureau does that it is a failure. What the Bureau must do is to stimulate and help local effort. It must gather facts and try to present them so convincingly and simply that they will be useful and stimulate many to activity.
Then there has been a great dread lest the Children’s Bureau might interfere with parental rights, lest the Bureau might seem to override the dignity and privacy of homes. I do not believe the Bureau will ever do that, because I know that the people who care most about the Bureau are people who realize that the welfare of the child is measured by the welfare and the wisdom of its parents, and that the way to help the child is not to take him out of the family, but keep him in it and help the parents to help him. And the Bureau will do its work with a fine respect for parenthood. And perhaps I cannot better close, since this is a woman’s meeting, and we may well be generous to the gentlemen scattered here and there, by a story of a man, a father.
Not long ago I went to a meeting in Chicago, at which there were many delegates from the foreign colonies in that city. It was a representative meeting standing for about one hundred thousand residents of that foreign town. It was really a meeting of protest against threatened restrictions which many of us thought very ill-advised and cruel, which were to be applied to immigration. A man rose who belonged to a foreign colony which we are accustomed to regard as especially dull and illiterate, and he told very simply how that colony had come from a people who had been oppressed, the study of its language had been forbidden, reading and writing had been forbidden, and in a way, a certain illiteracy and dulness had been forced upon them; and he told so simply with what ardor they came here where there was freedom, where there were schools. I shall never forget how simply he said, “I am a father, and, like every father, I want my child to go higher than me.”
That was the simple but overwhelmingly eloquent expression of a man whose English was very broken, but who, after all, spoke exactly the great impulse which has controlled all of us since the beginning of that wonderful seventeenth century when parents began to come over here. And, as I heard him speak, I thought that whether it was those who came in the cabin of the Mayflower, or those who sank in the steerage of the Titanic, they were all moved by that same mighty impulse, that the next generation should have a better chance than they had.
Now, this Bureau must move forward if it is to be useful in the same spirit in which families move forward, in which the race moves forward, to give the next generation a better chance than this has had. I thank you. (Applause.)