ialist. But I can't help feeling that
there's SOME solution for a wretched problem like that over there," a
wave of the hand indicated Old Paloma, "and perhaps, dabbling aimlessly
about in all sorts of places, one of us may hit upon it."

"But I thought the modern theory was against dabbling," said Mrs.
Brown, a little timidly, for she held a theory that she was not
"smart." "I thought everything was being done by institutions, and by
laws--by legislation."

"Nothing will ever be done by legislation, to my thinking at least,"
Mrs. Burgoyne said. "A few years ago we legislated some thousands of
new babies into magnificent institutions. Nurses mixed their bottles,
doctors inspected them, nurses turned them and washed them and watched
them. Do you know what percentage survived?"

"Doesn't work very well," said the doctor, shaking a thoughtful head
over his pipe.

"Just one hundred per cent didn't survive!" said Mrs. Burgoyne. "Now
they take a foundling or an otherwise unfortunate baby, and give it to
a real live mother. She nurses it if she can, she keeps near to it and
cuddles it, and loves it. And so it lives. In all the asylums, it's the
same way. Groups are getting smaller and smaller, a dozen girls with a
matron in a cottage, and hundreds of girls 'farmed out' with good,
responsible women, instead of enormous refectories and dormitories and
schoolrooms. And the ideal solution will be when every individual woman
in the world extends her mothering to include every young thing she
comes in contact with; one doll for her own child and another doll for
the ashman's little girl, one dimity for her own debutante, and another
just as dainty for the seventeen-year-old who brings home the laundry
every week."

"Yes, but that's puttering here and there," asserted Mrs. Brown,
"wouldn't laws for a working wage do all that, and more, too?"

"In the first place, a working wage doesn't solve it," Mrs. Burgoyne
answered vigorously, "because in fully half the mismanaged and dirty
homes, the working people HAVE a working wage, have an amount of money
that would amaze you! Who buys the willow plumes, and the phonographs,
and the enlarged pictures, and the hair combs and the white shoes that
are sold by the million every year? The poor people, girls in shops,
and women whose babies are always dirty, and always broken out with
skin trouble, and whose homes are hot and dirty and miserable and
mismanaged."

"Well, make some laws to