rnished by doctors specializing in children's
diseases, showed that in some cities, at least, the children of the
well-to-do were as often underfed or wrongly fed as were the children
of the poor. Sometimes the fact that a family is financially able to
employ a nurse, but not intelligent or conscientious enough to employ
a competent nurse, results in worse conditions, as to food and other
particulars, than are found where poor mothers do the best they can
with limited means.

=Items of Work in Child Hygiene.=--The standards of health and the
public provisions for their realization, which even now in the crowded
city of New York are so ably enforced by "The Division of Child
Hygiene," show that "the hazardous business of being a baby" is much
reduced in risks. The list of details of work undertaken by that
Division of Child Hygiene as so fully reported in the document of 1914
and in later publications may be of use if here repeated. They are as
follows:

I. Control and Supervision of Midwives.
II. Reduction of Infant Mortality.
III. Supervision of Foundlings Boarded in Private Homes.
IV. Inspection and Supervision of Day Nurseries.
V. Inspection of Institutions for Dependent Children.
VI. Medical Inspection and Examination of School Children.
VII. Vaccination of School Children.
VIII. Enforcing of Child-labor Law in Issuing Work Certificates.

For this many-sided work physicians, trained nurses, and various other
helpers are required. Could the public purse be drawn upon for a more
vital public necessity than this list indicates?

When it is remembered that from forty to fifty per cent, of births are
in charge of midwives in the foreign-born population and that the
condition of housing and of water, air and food supply are deplorably
inadequate in manufacturing centres, and that in rural communities
there are few doctors and nurses and little hospital service, it will
be seen that the idea of having Federal aid for this large health
requirement was not one of concentration of power in the Government
(as some have thought), but rather of a diffusion of standards and
better sharing in all parts of our country. The health crusade is not
bounded by state lines, diseases may cross those lines without
consciousness of any check. The help toward the abolition of all
preventable illness, the protection of child-life from all manner of
preventable weakness, abnormality and suffering, seems to be the
busines