waiting for the missionaries who will volunteer. To teach mothers the need for boiled water as a necessary drink for baby and older children is alone a worthy avocation. To impress upon one of these willing but ignorant mothers the absolute necessity for washing her hands before preparing baby's food, that she must keep a covered vessel in which the soiled napkins are placed until washed, that she should frequently sponge her baby in hot weather,—and explain thoroughly why these are important details,—is a work of true religious charity. They should be taught to rid their houses of flies, and especially to keep them from the baby and from its food, bottles, and nipples. They should be instructed to discontinue milk at the first sign of intestinal trouble, to give a suitable dose of castor oil, and to put the child on barley water as a food until the danger is passed. They should be taught to know the serious significance of a green watery stool, that it is the one danger signal in the summer time that no mother can ignore without wilfully risking the life of her baby. They should be shown how to prepare special articles of diet when they are needed. If every mother were educated to the extent as indicated in the above outline the appalling infant mortality would fall into insignificance. It is not a difficult task, nor would it take a long time to carry out; it is the work for willing women who have time and who perhaps spend that time in less desirable but more dramatic ways. It is education that is needed, and it is education that is willingly received, as all mothers are ready to devote their time in the acquirement of knowledge that will help them save their offspring. This is the eugenic opportunity and it is an opportunity that should devolve upon the women of the race.
Such a mothers' club would receive the willing financial support of the men of the community. It should be placed upon a sound financial basis because, to be successful, it would have to bestow much material aid. I know of clubs that are self-supporting, however. Each club needs a leader to begin it; will the reader be that one in her Community?
A Mothers' Eugenic Club would of course discuss
the practical side of the eugenic question: the proper feeding and clothing of children; hygiene, sanitation, housekeeping and homemaking, and the efficiency and health of each member of the home, and all other topics of interest to every wife and mother. The writer believes that in the very near future we shall have a Mothers' Eugenic Club in every community in the United States; that these clubs will be guided by, and be an instrument of, a National Eugenic Bureau, composed of women, that will coöperate and harmonize the work as a whole, so that the conservation of human life will be effected to its maximum extent; that the excessive infant mortality will be overcome, because ignorant and incompetent mothers—the greatest cause of infant mortality—will be educated and instructed in the rudiments of eugenics and will consequently, to a large extent, cease to be ignorant and incompetent; that the desecration of young wives will stop, and stop forever, because vice and disease will be branded and exposed; that the feeble-minded, the deaf-mute, the imbecile, and the insane, will no longer be allowed to propagate their kind, to the permanent detriment of the race.
When such clubs are established, and when all mothers do their individual duty in the interest of the race, we shall begin to see the dawn of a promise that will achieve its supreme success in the generations that will people the earth in the eugenic aftertime.
CHILD-BIRTH
CHAPTER VI
"Solicitude for children is one of the signs of a growing civilization. To cure is the voice of the past; to prevent, the divine whisper of to-day."
Kate Douglas Wiggin.