It is France that makes the security for maternity gilt-edged. By the gifts they are bringing here, one would say that this is the country that to-day takes precedence of all others in its appreciation of the rising value of a baby. As every one has heard, there has not in a long time, in generations indeed, been a surplus of babies in France. As a matter of fact, they have always been scarce. And they are so dear that the passion for the child is the distinctive national trait. This building in which Azalie de Rigeaux nurses her child to-day was erected at a cost of 75,000 francs. It stands in the factory yard, adjacent to the shop in which women make shells. In this sunny high-ceilinged room, with plenty of sunlight and air, rows and rows of dimpled babies sleep in the blue cribs with the dainty white cover-lids. Four times a day the mothers from the shop across the way, as Azalie de Rigeaux has now, come to nurse them. Outside the long French windows there is a large French “jardin,” where the older children, in blue and pink check aprons, play. The nursery dining-room has a low table with little low chairs, where they come to their meals. Nourishing broths and other foods are prepared in a shining, perfectly equipped kitchen. There is a white bathroom with porcelain basins and baths of varying sizes; on the long shelf across the room are the separate baskets that hold the individual brushes. Each child, on arrival in the morning, is given a bath and a complete change of clothes. Once a week they are weighed. The doctor and the staff of trained nurses are alert to detect the least deviation from normal. Scientific supervision like this costs the firm 1 franc 35 centimes per day per child. To Azalie de Rigeaux and the other mothers in their employ, it is free. It is this _crèche_ at Ivry-sur-Seine which is the model recommended by the ministry of munitions to the factories of France. The last feature to make this, a national institution, absolutely complete, has been added. It was the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes that one day held a conference with the ministry of munitions. “Gentlemen,” they said, “a mother who must go home from a factory to stand over a wash tub, gets so tired that the baby’s source of nourishment is imperilled. And when a baby languishes, a future soldier may be lost.”—A state department was at instant attention—“Gentlemen,” it was pointed out, “there is one thing more that you must do.” Well, they have done it. In this model babies’ building at Ivry-sur-Seine there is a steam laundry in which two women are kept constantly employed, so that there shall be no night laundry work for the child whom the mother takes home. There are washed eight hundred diapers a day. You see there is nothing that the Government will not do for a child in France. Nothing is too much trouble.