Secondly, the Great War, though the most terrible calamity to humanity of the ages, has brought out a most comforting and elevating thought. _Our brothers and our sons_,—and our daughters also in a multitude of munition and other works,—have proved that, under the overwhelming moral compulsion of national need, they _are willing and ready to lay down their lives for great impersonal things_, and in their hundreds of thousands they have done so. Coincidently with this, a great impetus has been given to work for the health and welfare of the civilian population, and especially of mothers and their children. The removable horrors and losses of peace, in the aggregate, are greater than those of war. Cannot an equal spirit of sacrifice be induced against these? Is it not possible to evoke a like devotion to secure the triumph of good over evil, of clean administration over political pull, of fair dealing over industrial exploitation, of adequate output over “slacking,” of determination to spend and be spent to secure the welfare of all, in peace as in war? Thirdly, prior to the war, for years, many among us had been realising to an increasing extent the supreme importance of the Mother and the Child, in safeguarding family life, and in securing the beginnings of personal and national health. In past years medical officers of health have been busily occupied in struggling to overcome epidemic diseases, and in attacking the circumstances favouring their prevalence. But for twenty years, at least, the outlook has widened; the physiological as well as the pathological aspects of hygiene have received attention; and it has been realised, more and more, that in the conservation and upbuilding of the health of the infant and the pre-school child rests the chief hope of the future; and somewhat more recently, public health policy has directed itself to the protection of motherhood, on which depends essentially the welfare of the child. This can only be done by ensuring, chiefly through its mother, _for every newcomer on the stage of life, in all essential points, a footing of equality of opportunity, physical, mental, and moral, with all others_. The ideal that every child should have equality of opportunity is really part of a general upward movement in our national ethical life. The thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. We begin to appreciate the full significance of the older words, “it is not the will of your Father that one of these little ones should perish”; and this ideal happily is now certain to replace the materialistic doctrine of the German type which drives the weaker to the wall.