“These letters” impressively announced the Right Honourable Herbert Samuel, “give an intimate picture of the difficulties, the miseries, the agonies that afflict many millions of our people as a consequence of normal functions of their lives. An unwise reticence has hitherto prevented the public mind from realising that maternity presents a whole series of urgent social problems. It is necessary to take action to solve the problems here revealed. The conclusion is clear that it is the duty of the community so far as it can to relieve motherhood of its burdens.” So you will now find the maternity centre being erected next door to the school for mothers. The Government in 1916, announcing that it would assume also 50 per cent. of this expense, sent a circular letter to all local authorities throughout the kingdom, urgently recommending the new institution “in spite of the war need for economy at the present time in all other directions.” [Illustration: HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH Formerly Consuelo Vanderbilt of New York, who is leading the movement in England for the conservation of the nation’s childhood. ] STARTING THE BABY RIGHT Mrs. Smith was automatically registered from the school for mothers to the books of the maternity centre when the Health Visitor learned that it was time. The medical authorities report that 40 per cent. of the total deaths of infants occur within a month after birth and are due very largely to conditions determined by the state of the mother’s health. A specific trouble is maternal exhaustion. Mrs. Smith, under weekly observation at the ante-natal clinic, was discovered to be hungry. She didn’t know it herself, because she had so long been that way. It gets to be a sort of habit with the working class woman, who must feed her husband first, because he is the bread winner. He has the meat and the children have the soup, and she is very likely to have the bread and tea. The clinic doctor, looking Mrs. Smith over, wrote out a prescription. It wasn’t put up in a bottle. It was put on a plate. Mrs. Smith was to attend the mothers’ dinner, served every day at the centre. The mother, being the medium of nourishment for the child, the good food that she would get here would do more than any dosing that might be done afterward to ensure the right kind of constitution for the coming little British citizen. In the “pre-natal class,” under the instruction of a sewing teacher and with municipal patterns furnished by the city of London, she made better baby clothes than she had ever had before. The materials, bought at wholesale, are furnished at cost price, the entire layette at 10s. to be paid for by a deposit of 6d. a week.