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
