s association, and
the absence everywhere of sufficient provision for healthful and
safeguarded recreation is so obvious, that we know we have still a
long and heavy task before us to accord children their admitted right
to social protection from moral evils against which even the best of
parents can not adequately stand alone.

=Standards of and Aids to Health.=--Health standards in the community,
fixed by experts and maintained, at least in minimum essentials, by
public provision, is the seventh right of children which society
should insure to each one.

The difficulties and dangers which inhere in any form of financial
payment to parents, either fathers or mothers, in aid of their
parental tasks, are not so clearly present, if present at all, in
special aids given to all the population in matters of public
sanitation, personal hygiene and the care of the sick. If we make our
public aid topical rather than by classes, and to all citizens alike
in definite aid, we avoid much of the taint of charity. Few, if any,
propose, for example, to give maternity aid to the rich. Fewer still
advocate old-age pensions for those of independent incomes of moderate
size. Many see, however, that health aids should be so distributed
and so universally offered and used that the standard of health may be
equally raised thereby for all. The idea that there are no people
between the rich, who can pay anything asked, and those poor who can
pay nothing for hospital care, diagnosis, or general medical and
nursing service, is becoming an exploded one. There is general
agreement among those most intelligent in such matters that what is
needed more than anything else in the field of physical culture and
physical care is provision for the people of small incomes who desire
to be self-supporting. It is a common saying that no one but a
millionaire or a pauper can afford a surgical operation or a trained
nurse. We are moving, too slowly, but still moving, toward some form
of provision of doctors, nurses, hospital and convalescent care, to
which people of refinement, of independent feeling but of limited
purse, can resort when they need such aid without a sense of
humiliation or incurring the danger of wholly unsuitable
companionship. Whatever difficulties there may be in securing adequate
aid of this sort to adults, there can be none in the case of children.
When we started Boards of Health we definitely outlined a path from
the doctor's office a