Industry to-day beckoning the woman, you see, Parliament is bound to provide for the child. Mrs. Smith in England—or in America or anywhere else—you need not hesitate. Azalie de Rigeaux’s baby is, what is it one shall say, as good as gold all day long. Do you know that he is so well regulated that there is no deviation from his perfection save on Mondays when he gets back to the _crèche_ fretful and perhaps a little inclined to be colicky after a week end at home? At that munitions _crèche_ down your street the babies shall have a bath every day and no one will have to carry the water toilsomely upstairs by the pint. Think of the dainty cribs to sleep in and the beautiful green garden to play in! There are three meals a day that never fail. You can easier pay for those meals than cook them. How many skilled vocations are you trying to follow in your home! The graduate of a school for mothers, you are doing, the best you can, more than the winner of a Cambridge tripos would attempt to undertake! Cooking and sewing and nursing, laundry work and scrubbing and child culture, that is the gamut of the achievements you are trying to accomplish. Oh, Mrs. Smith, one trade in the factory is easier. What artisan can be good at his job if he must also putter with half a dozen others? Well, the world is no longer going to ask it of you, the maker of men! THE CHILD’S CHANCE DEPENDS ON FAMILY INCOME Tradition may still rise to protest: But the home! You wouldn’t abolish the home! I think you would if you had seen it, Mrs. Smith’s home. Child mortality in her street is at the rate of 200 per 1,000. I know a home in the other end of London that is as lovely as a poet’s dream. Child mortality in this district is 40 per 1,000. There is a great house facing a park. There are three children in it. They have a day nursery and a night nursery and a school room all to themselves. They are cared for by a head nurse, and an assistant nurse, a governess, and a mother who now and then comes to caress them and see that they are happy. There are, you see, four women—to say nothing of the household staff of eight servants indirectly contributing to the same service—to care for three children in the West End. In the East End Mrs. Smith has only one pair of hands to do for seven, and she is no super-woman. They live in two rooms that the fiercest all the time scrubbing could not keep clean. The discoloured walls are damp with mildew. You can see the vermin in the cracks. There isn’t any pantry. There isn’t any sink. There isn’t so much as a cook stove, only an open grate. _There isn’t any poetry in a home on less than a pound a week!_