How much easier it is to say piously, “It is the Lord’s will,” than to take trouble and bear expense and lay aside age-long custom and prejudice in order that little ones may live! But we must not judge too harshly when we remember how long it has taken more enlightened lands to learn the great value of the lives of the children and how to care for these lives. Rather should we be all the more ready to send and carry to them the light and knowledge that have come to us. Then there will be fewer such scenes as one missionary mother witnessed in Syria. It was in a Jewish family where there were four little girls. The baby was a mass of sores from head to foot, and the missionary physician said that they were merely the result of mal-nutrition. But the mother said that her husband was utterly unwilling to buy a little milk each day,--“It is not worth while, for she is only another little girl.” [Sidenote: Special work for missionary mothers.] It is a most legitimate and absolutely essential part of missionary work,--and not one of the easiest tasks, either,--to teach parents that “children intelligently fed during infancy, childhood, and youth may hope for normal health in adult life, with natural physical strength, endurance, buoyancy.” Here is a special field of labor for missionary mothers, who have this advantage over physicians and teachers that they can teach by object lessons which _always_ make a deeper impression than exhortation or verbal instruction. Of course the missionary mother often has the great handicap of an adverse climate in which to bring up her child. But her intelligent application of the principles she should learn in order to fit _her_ for motherhood, and her willingness to teach these principles to the ignorant mothers so interested in all that pertains to the little foreign baby, may be some of the greatest factors in the future welfare, stamina, and development of great nations such as China and India. [Sidenote: Children starving.] Which is more harmful to a child, reckless, indiscriminate over-feeding or under-feeding and starvation diet? In lands swept periodically by famine or flood or devastated by war and massacre, there are thousands of little children who literally starve to death while other thousands continue to exist,--but what an existence it is! How can it but have its evil effect on the mind and morals of a child as well as on its physical well-being to be deprived of proper or sufficient nourishment during the years of growth and development? If child welfare is the legitimate, rightful responsibility of every Christian woman, then it behooves us to see that such scenes as the following cease to be possible anywhere in the world.