Page:Women Wanted.djvu/346

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WOMEN WANTED

you are going to have a baby in Nottingham, England, a public health visitor comes round to see that you are perfectly comfortable and quite all right. And the municipality that is thus anxiously watching over your welfare solicitously inquires through a printed blank on which the reply is to be recorded, "Have you two nightgowns?" In Berlin large signs at the subway and elevated stations direct you to institutions where rates are moderate, or even the Kaiser himself will be glad to pay the bill. Similar facilities are offered by the government of France in the "Guide des Services Gratuits Protegeant la Maternite," with which the walls of Paris are placarded. Even the war baby, whose cry for attention not all the ecclesiastical councils and the military tribunals commanding "Hush" has been able to still, at last is too valuable to be lost. And every Parliament has arranged to extend the nation's protection on practically equal terms to all children, not excluding those we have called "illegitimate," because somebody before them has broken a law.

FINANCING MATERNITY

You see, yesterday only a mother counted her jewels. To-day states count them too. Even Jimmie Smith in, we will say, England, who before the war might have been regarded as among the least of these little ones, has become the object of his country's concern. Jimmie came screaming into this troublous world in a borough of London's East End, where there were already so many people that