The proper attitude of voluntary workers is to initiate and demonstrate the value of reforms, to persuade local authorities to adopt them, themselves to become members of these local authorities to ensure this end, and thus eventually render the voluntary organization for the object in question superfluous. There need be no fear; openings for further desirable voluntary work will always appear, as official work increases. In the main, however, the care of the health of the people is a governmental function, whether it has to do with the prevention of sickness or the satisfactory medical treatment and nursing of the sick. There is no early prospect of voluntary workers becoming unnecessary; for average human nature, as represented on governmental bodies, is shortsighted and needs much education, morally and intellectually, before it will undertake the whole sphere of work called for in the interest of the welfare of the mother and her child. Hence my plea that the magnificent potentialities of the Red Cross organization should not be allowed to fall into abeyance; that they should replace their relief work by preventive work; that, to use a well-known simile, they should erect a parapet at the top of a dangerous cliff as well as provide ambulances at its foot. In so doing they will, I am confident, not encroach on present successful work of existing bodies concerned with promoting child welfare, or with the prevention of tuberculosis or of venereal diseases, or with existing agencies for providing nurses for the poor. But they can supplement the efforts of these organizations; they can bring monetary as well as personal assistance; and they can, above all, bring a mass of public opinion to bear on local and central governing bodies which will lead to the only real economy, which consists in expenditure on an adequate scale, bringing to the aid of the families of the people the preventive, the medical, and the nursing facilities of which they remain in need. FOOTNOTES: [13] An address to the Academy of Medicine, Toronto, June 20, 1919. CHAPTER VI THE INTER-RELATION OF VARIOUS SOCIAL EFFORTS[14]