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 business of society in general, if anything can be so called. The children must be saved if the nation is to prosper. It used to be thought that a high birth-rate was a sufficient indication of national well-being. It is now seen that a low death-rate and a high level of strength and vitality, of health and mental power, are still more the required national asset. As Dr. Helen D. Putnam well says, "Democracy must finally depend on its department of education for establishing the right: for mothers, intelligence, health, economic opportunity to care for their babies; for babies, either rich or poor, intelligent, physically competent caretakers," If this be true, then the work of Health Boards and kindred agencies is a part of general education as it has long been a part of accepted charitable duty. The children stand first in line for receipt of that health education because they are the promise of the future. We must take humane care of all the misfits, all the crippled, all the weak, all the defective, all the abnormal and the insane. This is now admitted. We must prevent, so far as we are able, such weight and burden falling upon our children and our children's children, as charity now presses upon us. In this matter, at least, "we must begin with the grandfathers if we would reform the world."