Mrs. Smith counts it a confinement _de luxe_ that brought him. For the first occasion in her maternal history she did not have to get out of bed to do the washing. For two weeks she just “laid up” while a Home Help took the helm in her household. The Home Help is an adaptable person in a clean blouse and a clean apron, who comes in each morning, and cooks and scrubs, and washes, and gets the children off to school. Her wages of 13s. a week were paid half by the centre and half by Mrs. Smith through her weekly 6d. contribution to the Home Help Society. But there was a greater event than even the Home Help. A “bed to yourself to have a baby in,” is the dream of luxury to which the working class woman with her new war-time allowance looks forward. Mrs. Smith, carefully saving out a shilling here from the “coal and lights,” and another shilling there, perhaps, from “clothes and boots,” painfully accumulating the little fund, had achieved the bed of her ambition. And neighbours from the length of the square and around the next turning came in to look at her as she lay in state, as it were, the new improved baby by her side. There are improved babies like Mrs. Smith’s arriving every day in England. They are not all among the working class. They are reported with increasing frequency, as at Nottingham and Huddersfield, among the artisan class. Even comparatively well-to-do mothers in the best of homes have not in the past been always accustomed to the skilled medical supervision during pregnancy which is now afforded without cost. It is Parliament’s plan to have the new maternity service as available for the entire population as is public education for school children. The city of Bradford exhibits the ideal of a complete municipal system now in successful operation: an infants’ department occupying a new three-story building, with a consultation to which 600 mothers come weekly; a maternity department with the ante-natal clinic; a maternity hospital, announced as “the first of its kind” in the world; a staff of municipal midwives for service in the homes; a cooking depot, from which meals in heat-proof vessels distributed by motor vans are dispensed to 500 expectant mothers daily; and a staff of 20 women health visitors to connect the homes of Bradford with all of this municipal maternity service. Still England’s comprehensive scheme of assistance to mothers grows. Down the street, Mrs. Smith noticed one day another new institution that has been started. It is a municipal _crèche_, for which the Government pays 75 per cent. of the cost of operation. The sign in the window says that it is a nursery for the care and maintenance of the children of munition workers. Three meals are provided, and the charge is 6d. a day. Just around the corner, the Labour Exchange has out a sign, “8,000 women wanted at once for shell-filling factories. Age 16 to 40. No previous experience necessary. Fill the factories and help to win the war.”