hows, and in exact proportion of its increasing social power,
an alertness and a moral earnestness in all that concerns the welfare
of children that have perpetuated and extended the protective
functions of society as no other agency has done. Much of the modern
legislation and social work directed toward the physical and moral
safeguarding of the young has been instituted and is carried out in
detail largely by women. The passage of the so-called Maternity Bill
by our National Congress, at the recognized instigation of women of
the United States, and the call it makes for a large staff of women
workers to carry out its provisions, is a case in point. This
protective work for mothers and babies is not always done by women who
are themselves mothers. Perhaps too often its details are in charge of
those lacking deep experience of life, and hence not able to interpret
new laws of social control to parents of ancient ideals and backward
social culture. But women in any case are called for in large numbers
to translate the ancient personal duty of protective care of the young
in terms of social obligations.

=The Provision of Food, Clothing, and Shelter.=--The second recognized
ancient duty of mothers is in respect to the provision of food,
clothing, and shelter for the young. This duty has undergone great
changes of method during the last century, and in the large centres of
population has altered almost past recognition. These changes seem to
many to minimize the individual mother's responsibility in these
matters to the vanishing point.

It is indeed an almost immeasurable distance from the primitive mother
scratching the soil with her sharpened stick, her baby bound to her
bended back, in order to plant a few seeds for a tiny harvest to save
the life of her child when the hunt should be poor, to the modern
mother whose food supply for her family comes to the table from all
parts of the earth at the call of her telephone. Is the modern mother,
then, released from all obligations as to that food supply? It is a
long step also from the primitive mother making slowly with her thorn
needle the only garment her child may wear, and even a long step from
the home spinning, weaving and dyeing of later handicraft, to the
modern use of the "ready-made" shop and the division of all
garment-making into innumerable specialties of labor. Is the modern
mother thereby released from care concerning the family clothing?

For the modern