(National President Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teachers Association. From speech delivered at Third International Congress of the Association.)
The Government’s interest in children shown to all the world has stimulated every nation to deeper study of its own conditions as they relate to child life and the effect has been more far-reaching than can be estimated.
America, which is the Mecca for every nation, which has within its borders over 100,000 children of foreign birth and one-quarter of whose children are of foreign parentage, can claim a wider interest in the children of every nation than can any other nation on the globe, for within the boundaries of the United States may be found children of every race and every clime.
The Rising Value of a Baby
By Mabel Potter Daggett
(In “Pictorial Review.”)
Only a mother counted her jewels yesterday, you see. Today, 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 three hundred thousand 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.
Ideals of the Child
By Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg