mmigrant, the ignorant, the
destitute, and the defective. It is at least desirable to press the
point that no state lives to itself and no one dies to itself. Disease
knows no boundary lines of political government and the death-toll of
mothers and babies does not halt at geographical limitations. We are
all one country insofar as bad social conditions are concerned. We are
all helped when any smallest country town most remote from the centres
of population is raised in its social standards and conditions. Hence,
perhaps, we may not fear national aid to each locality in need or feel
concerned as to what agency accomplishes a required social advance.

Ellen Key declared that every mother should be maintained by the state
during the first year of every child's life and that afterward each
child should have one-half its support from the state and one-half
from the father. That may not be the ideal. We may believe that to
thus reduce the father's responsibility would mean a dangerous
lessening of his energy and devotion to the family well-being. It is
true, however, that while there are so many in every community without
essentials for care in childbirth or for the early nurture of infants,
we must find some way of providing these essentials, or the state is
endangered at its vital centre.

=Every Child Should Have a Competent Father.=--The third demand of
childhood is for a competent father. That takes us at once into the
area of wages and economic conditions. When the Children's Bureau,
itself a testimony to the awakened social conscience in respect to
childhood, shows from careful investigation that in families where the
father earns only ten dollars or less a week more than twice as many
babies die before the age of two years than in families where the
fathers earn twenty-five dollars a week or more, we can see with
clearer vision than ever before that to give babies a fair chance in
life the father must be fairly paid for his work.

The following table shows this fact in graphic form:

[Illustration: INFANT MORTALITY RATES. ACCORDING TO FATHERS'
EARNINGS
COMBINED FIGURES FROM SEVEN CITIES STUDIED BY US CHILDREN'S BUREAU.
The baby death rate rises as the fathers' earnings fall.]

=Economic Aspects of the Father's Competency.=--The death-rate of
babies in families in which the mother has to earn outside the home
under factory conditions of labor in order to secure absolute
necessities is so high that it is seen