Chapter XVIII: Section VIII: The Congress shall have power (8)

While we are waiting slightly for the first speaker of the evening, I have asked the next one upon the program to take her place. I am sure it will be just as much of a pleasure to you, and I am sure it will be a pleasure to her, to take the earlier place upon the program.

We are all very much interested, as men and women, as fathers and mothers, in the Children’s Bureau which has been created this past year, and we were very much interested in the possibility of a woman being made chief of that bureau. There never was a question in our minds but that it should be the very best person that could be found, whether man or woman. But the fact that there was a woman who by education, training and experience was fitted to take this place has been a pleasure to all who are interested in that special development. The fact that she has looked into the life of children from birth through childhood, with work and play and home and school as they have applied to the life of the child, will be of the greatest benefit to us all through these future years.

I am very glad to introduce to this representative audience of the Congress, Miss Julia Clifford Lathrop, who is Chief of the Children’s Bureau of the United States Department of Commerce and Labor.

Miss LATHROP—Madam President, Ladies and Gentlemen: I need not explain to a Congress interested in Conservation why the representative of this new Bureau should be here and should wish to speak about the Bureau itself.

When I was first honored with this appointment it was suggested that the Bureau should be staffed with women alone, and I was asked what I thought about it. I said I should be very much embarrassed; that I had never known any children who had not two parents, and that I felt that if there had been intended a division of that sort the Lord would have communicated it long ago. I thought it would be presumptious for me to begin, so the Children’s Bureau has on its staff both men and women and, perhaps, I may as well begin by saying something about that staff, and about the organization of this new Bureau. And, first of all, perhaps I may forestall a criticism which is likely to come before very long that we are rather dilatory and are not accomplishing very much, by reminding you that the Bureau did not go into operation last April, when the President approved the bill, but only on the 23d of August, when the appropriation became available, so that really the Bureau is just forty-one days old. It has a staff of fifteen persons, and it has to spend for this first year a sum aggregating about thirty thousand dollars. Its province, as the law says, is to inquire into and report upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life. You can see for yourselves whether that is a big job and whether the army really seems adequate for immediate performance of the contract.

It is, of course, enormously important that a Bureau of this kind, undertaking a sort of work which, after all, is in some respects new, should be composed of people who have very much at heart the welfare of children; who have, even as much as that, the scientific training and wisdom which is necessary if we are to make an appeal to people’s emotions and sentiment. So the staff of the Bureau is composed of people who have been selected from various departments of the Federal Civil Service as having, particularly, acquirements in science, as statisticians, and in other respects particularly fitted, as we believe and as my superiors believe, to do the work of this growing Bureau.

The Bureau has this great general object. Now, it is a question how to take hold of this great task, where to begin, but the law itself does give some hint—it enumerates certain objects which we shall discuss in detail as time goes on.

The first of these is infant mortality and the birth rate, and after that follows various subjects, such as juvenile courts, or the care of children in regard to diseases and accidents which may befall them, the regulation of their labor, legislation affecting children and all matters pertaining to their welfare.

It is all very well for those of us who are doing all sorts of volunteer work, as most of us are, to begin on the problem of helping people at any point where we can take hold. We do not have to know any great fundamental facts; to know that babies need care, and that children ought not to go to work when they are too young, to know that children need to go to school, need to be healthy, need to be happy, and that they need recreation just as much as they do education and that the two are part of the one same great sort of development—all these things we have a right to begin on anywhere we can. But when the Federal Government takes hold, I think it somehow promises a sort of basis to all the rest of us, and it seems as if it were its business to see where there was the most fundamental point to begin its work. When we come to look at the question of dealing with children, we are constantly faced by the fact that we do not know how many children there are; we do not know how many children are born and die in this country. We do know once in ten years how many children exist at a particular moment, and by that decennial information we know that the Bureau has to deal with about thirty-six per cent. of the total population of this country directly, that between thirty-five and forty per cent. of the population of this country is under sixteen years of age, which seems to be the age of the end of childhood, just by common acceptation; at least, at that age in many of our States children are permitted to become independent workmen. So you see we have a very large number of children with whom we have the right to deal directly, and, as I tried to show a moment ago, we think we have a right to deal indirectly with all their parents. We think the whole country is a good deal our province in prospect, but we cannot be satisfied with this decennial knowledge of how many people there are in this country. What we want is a great, democratic continuing public edition of “Who’s Who in America.” We want to know day by day the advent of every citizen into this country. We want, in fact, in a phrase which is not particularly exciting, “birth registration.”

First of all, we want it because we want to know, and we want to know for various reasons, which I think do not occur to most of us every day. In the first place, we want to know because, unfortunately, a great many babies come into this world under circumstances which do not give them the best chance in the world. If the advent of a little child could be at once communicated to doctors and nurses where doctors and nurses are not taken for granted, it would be possible to prevent the risk of that blindness which sometimes overtakes newly-born children; it is possible to establish the health of the mother and child together, so that it may have the best chance in the world; and you all know how throughout this country, even in our remoter counties, there is coming to be a great and splendid health service. I think we cannot be too delighted with what the Red Cross Society, with what many similar societies are doing in the way of rural nursing. I think if Florence Nightingale could look out over America now, she would think we are beginning to realize her noble words about health and nurses.

Now, those are perhaps the most important reasons why we want to know the advent of every child, so that we can help that little child, and help his mother and keep her alive, because it is a very terrible thing that out of all the children who are born into this country a very large number—two hundred thousand, some people say, and three hundred thousand, some people say—die before they are twelve months old, and more, a third of them die before they have been in the world a month. I want us to consider this for a minute, not as an economic problem, but what it means in the old fashioned terms of human suffering, the agony and loss of family happiness and joy, that two hundred thousand little babies should die and leave the hearths to which they come every single year of the world in this country. And when we think that already, doctors tell us, we know enough so that that waste is very largely the fault of our carelessness and selfishness and greed, it makes us blush to think we are not all working hard to save the lives of these children.

Now, there are great efforts already undertaken to save the lives of these little babies, in which many of you are already engaged, and we may well hope that such societies as this Conservation Congress and the Congress for the Prevention of Infant Mortality will before the next decennial census occurs have made a great difference in the number of children who are born, only to die.

But, suppose that a child lives, is there any real sense in his having a birth certificate, or is that just some abstract notion of the statisticians, who get all the certificates and have punching machines and a great many mechanical contrivances for numbering and making computations out of figures? I think you will be surprised to find how much human connection it has.

In the first place, as to this very Bureau for which I am venturing to speak, we are told to find out about the diseases of children and about the birth rate of children. How can we know about the birth rate unless we know how many children are born and die? In Washington, there was set up a wonderful placard on the wall to show the birth rate in that city, and there were columns of red and green and other colors, and you just knew, humanly speaking, that the birth rate was fluctuating that way, and you talked with somebody and you discovered that this birth rate was fluctuating as one set of gentlemen or another was electing the health officer.

So now we want to have some authoritative way of truly finding out how many children come into the world in order to know what the birth rate is, in order to know how to study the diseases of children, and then, when children grow a little older, we want to have a public record of their births so that we may know when they are entitled to go into the schools to begin on that system of care and culture for which the public schools stand, and then beyond that, when they are older and the time comes for their advent into the army of work to which we hope we all belong, then we want to know that those who are less favored are not hurried into that army unduly. How much it would simplify the problem if we had not to trust to all sorts of chance ways of proving a child’s birth and if we had a public record of it.

Have you ever thought that we are the only great nation which does not know how many children are born into it, and which does not do its children the dignity of putting their names down in a public record? All Europe has a public registry, and why? Because it has a standing army and wants the names of its boys for conscription. Now, in a country of peace, aren’t we to have any victories for peace? Are not we to recognize a child as having any dignity to be a peaceable citizen and not either a target for a gun, or the man behind the gun?

I think you will, perhaps, be interested if I venture to tell a story of a neighborhood in which I have lived long, an illustration of how a birth certificate is a good thing. A little while ago, a family came over to Hull House for some help. They were awfully poor. The oldest girl, who was at that time the breadwinner of that family, was out of work on account of the garment workers’ strike. There were eight children. They had come over at the time of the earthquake in Messina. The father had been entombed and his mind had almost succumbed to the fearful experience. He was always thinking the walls were coming on him and he was not in a very good frame of mind to be a successful breadwinner. So they got into difficulties and asked the Charities Board to help them. There was another younger girl and they thought they had better get a work certificate for Giovanna, but the truant officer said she looked too young and couldn’t have it, and she was sent back to school. And then they got a little more desperate and they tried again to have poor little Giovanna go to work. The Charities Board, who were helping the case, thought they had a right to dictate a little as to how they should help, and they just wrote to the City Hall in Messina, and the City Hall in Messina sent back a very prompt letter showing how old the children were, and showing that the daughter who had been at work for two years was really about fourteen years old and had been working that time illegally, had been cheated of two years of school, where she might have learned good English and learned American housekeeping and had a better chance to earn more money the next two years. The other little girl was still younger. So the people in Hull House and the people in the Associated Charities and the factory inspector made a veritable cordon around this helpless family and demanded they be sent back to school. The oldest girl went back very unwillingly. She said indignantly, “Me go back to school, me big enough to be married.” She was very hurt and humiliated. I am not sure we did right about it. Giovanna was confiscated and sent back to school for two years. This family did not have a fair chance over here just because the factory inspector and school authorities, not having any birth reports over here for children, followed the usual system of guessing and did not think to take advantage of what Messina, notwithstanding the earthquake, had to offer from her very responsible records.

Has it ever occurred to you that to very many of our foreign residents a birth certificate for a child would be an absolute asset?

In Chicago is a very prosperous and highly respected man. He came from Germany when he was a baby of four years, with the family. His father was never naturalized and the man himself never was challenged in his right to vote. He grew up and attended our public schools, and all that. He accumulated a fortune and went back, as many people do, I suppose rather proud, to see the old country and friends who remained there and with whom he had kept in constant communication, a prosperous and splendid example of what America could do for a man. He had been in Berlin for about two hours when the police were on his track merely because he was a German citizen and must serve in the army. He telephoned to a lawyer friend and asked him what could happen. He said, “There is just one thing that can happen, and that is that you get out of town.” So, two hours after he arrived at Berlin on this triumphal journey, he left very actively, and he is said never to have heaved a sigh of such joyful relief as when the crossed the boundary into France. That is an example of people really knowing where they were born and being able to prove it.

I suppose the reason we have not been more eager about our birth rate is because we have not thought anything about it. We think a great deal about writing the baby’s name in the family Bible and christening it in the church we attend, but somehow we have forgotten this larger, more fundamental thing. The advent, of every citizen of this country ought to be on the books of the commonwealth.

There is a very good story, which belongs to your own Dr. Hurty. I do not know whether you all know it, or whether I dare tell it, but I will presume that this audience is largely made up of visitors, and steal his story. In this State, Dr. Hurty is authority for saying there was a farmer who had a ne’er-do-well son and a granddaughter, and when the farmer came to die he wished to leave the farm to the granddaughter, but he left the use of it to the son until the granddaughter should arrive at the age of twenty-one. When the girl, as she thought, was twenty-one, she claimed her inheritance, but the other side said she was only nineteen. She went to the Bible, where her name was written down, but the leaf was torn out, and the court was very much perplexed. It came to be a serious legal question, and finally a neighbor recollected that the grandfather had had a very remarkable calf born on the same day with this little girl, and he said he knew the farm books kept by the grandfather would record this pedigree. So the farm books were looked up and the birth of the calf was discovered and the birth of the girl was established. (Laughter.) You all remember how George Bernard Shaw warns us against placing confidence in the _deus ex machina_. He says you cannot presume on things being some miraculous way you would like them to be, and so we cannot presume on grandfathers always keeping herds of cattle. (Applause.)

I am perfectly sure, as I have said before, as I had the honor of saying over at San Francisco before the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, that if the women of America wanted birth registration they would get it in a twelvemonth. Now, it sounds so very remote from putting down the baby’s name in the book.

In the State of Indiana you have a very good law, Dr. Hurty tells me, and all that is necessary is for the women of Indiana to say that they want the names when their children are born recorded in the public records of Indiana. In 1910, when the last census was taken, all that we know about the births in this country was what we learned from eight States, the New England States, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Not your State, or mine, Illinois, was deemed worthy to be considered at all. So far as the general government was concerned, for anything it knew, nobody had been born in either of these States in ten years. In the next census year, I hope very much in a great many States in this country, perhaps in all the States in this country, we shall be able to be recognized by the general government as having been born and as having been born very accurately, so that we will be worthy to be counted, as much so as if we lived in Boston and Massachusetts, which, they are always telling us, are the most accurate State and city.

Of course, the Bureau cares for a great many things besides the registration of births, but I hope I have made it plain that we should ask that we be allowed to get a method of acquiring steady, constant and reliable means of legal proof as to the children who enter this Nation, because it is the dignified basis for a governmental Bureau, which I believe is destined to grow to proportions which none of us can measure, which shall continue long after all of us are gone. No other bureau in the world makes so tremendous an appeal to the emotions and sentiment—a children’s bureau, a bureau to concern itself with the life and happiness of the children of a great nation, and the more appealing it is, the more must it be founded upon facts which will bear the very closest scientific scrutiny. What the Bureau will be doing years from now I do not know. I know what it must do now. The law is very distinct about some of the things it must do, and by implication many of the things it cannot do. It is a bureau to gather information and to publish it as the secretary of the department under which it exists may direct. It can publish in any way which the secretary deems best. There are a great many different ways of publishing facts. We are learning to publish facts through the sort of thing you have in the State House here and other exhibits, through the appeal to the eye. In this way thousands of those who cannot study very carefully or cannot read a table to save their lives may understand, and I hope it is with some of the simpler methods of popularizing things that this Bureau may begin to make itself useful.

The Bureau, although it is a different type from all the other work of the government in a certain sense, after all, is not so isolated as we might think. There is a Bureau of Labor, which has studied much the labor of women and children. There is the Census Bureau, of which I have spoken. There is the Bureau of Immigration and of Education, and the Bureau in the Department of Agriculture, which has concerned itself very much in the South with those very interesting and productive efforts for better farming, which have begun their activities by stimulating tomato-canning among the girls. All of these things, part of them purely educational, part of them a matter of direct work, are things which we shall not do over again, from which we hope to learn very much.

There have been a good many anxieties about this Bureau, many people have thought it was a mistake. Some people have said, “Ah, well, you are going to center everything about children away off there in Washington where there will be a government with a lot of very comfortable clerks sitting about in offices and writing down figures about children instead of doing things for children and you will palsy local effort.” If the Bureau does that it is a failure. What the Bureau must do is to stimulate and help local effort. It must gather facts and try to present them so convincingly and simply that they will be useful and stimulate many to activity.

Then there has been a great dread lest the Children’s Bureau might interfere with parental rights, lest the Bureau might seem to override the dignity and privacy of homes. I do not believe the Bureau will ever do that, because I know that the people who care most about the Bureau are people who realize that the welfare of the child is measured by the welfare and the wisdom of its parents, and that the way to help the child is not to take him out of the family, but keep him in it and help the parents to help him. And the Bureau will do its work with a fine respect for parenthood. And perhaps I cannot better close, since this is a woman’s meeting, and we may well be generous to the gentlemen scattered here and there, by a story of a man, a father.

Not long ago I went to a meeting in Chicago, at which there were many delegates from the foreign colonies in that city. It was a representative meeting standing for about one hundred thousand residents of that foreign town. It was really a meeting of protest against threatened restrictions which many of us thought very ill-advised and cruel, which were to be applied to immigration. A man rose who belonged to a foreign colony which we are accustomed to regard as especially dull and illiterate, and he told very simply how that colony had come from a people who had been oppressed, the study of its language had been forbidden, reading and writing had been forbidden, and in a way, a certain illiteracy and dulness had been forced upon them; and he told so simply with what ardor they came here where there was freedom, where there were schools. I shall never forget how simply he said, “I am a father, and, like every father, I want my child to go higher than me.”

That was the simple but overwhelmingly eloquent expression of a man whose English was very broken, but who, after all, spoke exactly the great impulse which has controlled all of us since the beginning of that wonderful seventeenth century when parents began to come over here. And, as I heard him speak, I thought that whether it was those who came in the cabin of the Mayflower, or those who sank in the steerage of the Titanic, they were all moved by that same mighty impulse, that the next generation should have a better chance than they had.

Now, this Bureau must move forward if it is to be useful in the same spirit in which families move forward, in which the race moves forward, to give the next generation a better chance than this has had. I thank you. (Applause.)

The CHAIRMAN—Those of us who heard Dr. Wiley, the other evening, give his impressions, may be interested in giving to Miss Lathrop another fact which will prove the value of birth registry. Dr. Wiley said that no one across the water could marry unless he could prove that he had been born. It would be impossible for many to marry in this country, if that were the case here.

We have always admired the way the Daughters of the American Revolution have taken the history of our country, have looked up the old stamping grounds and marked them, and have taught the children in schools the traditions of the country, to honor the makers of our country and to make them good American citizens. But we are really more pleased that the Daughters of the American Revolution have recently taken up more modern things, and that they are preserving the resources of the children. The speaker has been very much interested in modern life, in community life for the rural life of our country.

As a loyal Daughter, I have great pleasure in introducing to you Mrs. Matthew T. Scott, of Washington, D. C., President General of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Mrs. SCOTT—Madam President, Members of the Fourth Conservation Congress: Among the many opportunities for service, which today are open to women in this country, there are three to which I wish to call attention for a few moments this evening. The first is that of the unrealized possibilities of the home life of the nation. If we only were endowed with a larger share of that priceless attribute—the constructive imagination—we should be able to see the untold resources which still lie latent, waiting only to be discovered, developed and enjoyed in the mysterious precincts of that laboratory of the soul—that forging-room of character, that fountain-head of those subtle forces which add temper and edge and distinction to our ordinary human attributes—that civic and social Holy of Holies—which we call Home.

And let us remember that the sources of our country’s permanent prosperity and glory lie not in the form of our government, in the wisdom of its administration, nor even in its written laws and constitution, but deep in the intellectual and moral life of society, and potentially in those nameless influences, radiating from the women who give its halcyon charm to hearthstone and library and to all the intimacies and inspirations of the home. For, after all, it is the home—the sanctuary to which we women must hark back—the home, with its _sanctity_, which is the palladium, the corner-stone, the key to the arch, of all that is most precious in the life and destiny of America.

Again, let us never forget, that to us women—the home-makers of our land—as never before in the world’s history, is entrusted the healthy development of the social and moral fabric of society in our country, in the innumerable and intricate complications of this Twentieth Century civilization. A distinguished educator has recently said:

“At the present time the world is awakening to the teachings of the old prophets. Now, as then, the morals and ethics of a nation are just what the wives and mothers, the home-makers of the land, make them.”

Again, the home is also the place where the future citizens of this nation are to be trained. The place that fosters patriotism, obedience and love, reverence for authority, the finest elements of character. Some day the present generation will have to hand this country over to the sons and daughters who are being trained by fathers and mothers of today to administer the affairs of the home, in preparation for the larger field and wider duties of government. It is well for youth to learn that honest toil is never hopeless or degrading. It is well for youth to be at one with Nature and to learn of her; to know and feel the joy there is in bountiful, glorious Nature; to be familiar with her song—the ripple of the river on its stones, the murmur of trees, the rhythm of the sap that rises in them, the thunder in the hills, the stars shining in perennial beauty, the song of the thrush, and the carol of the lark; to watch the sun in its course and learn the dim paths of the forest.

“It is the song of infinite harmonies.”

The man, woman or child of vision responds—perhaps, all unconsciously and inarticulately—but responds like a vibrating chord to the note of these melodies, that should be part of the charm of the home-life of the farm.

There can be no disputing the fact that a goodly number of American women are wonderfully successful home-makers. But at the same time, it must be admitted, that a large number of our household mistresses must plead guilty to the charges of extravagance—technical ignorance of household economy—and a considerable degree of all-round inefficiency, both as housekeepers and as home-makers, for the terms are not synonymous.

It is a commonplace among sociologists that in most well-to-do American homes enough is wasted in the kitchen alone to keep a French family in comfort. We are also wasteful of light and heat, and, above all, of our time and energy. Our country is in dire need of a woman who will do for the home what a distinguished inventor and public benefactor of Philadelphia has done for the factory—that is, introduce an “efficiency” system, which will do away with our present waste of both money and time, and increase the quantity and quality of the actual output—not only of creature comforts, but also of artistic attractiveness; and of that indefinable atmosphere of peace and restfulness, which, of all the by-products of home life, is certainly the pearl of greatest price. The time will surely come when both mistress and maid will prepare for their life’s work—as home-makers—with the same care and enthusiasm that men now put into the work of perfecting themselves in their various trades and professions. Home-making, like piano-playing, is an art—to succeed in which requires something more than temperament. Until the technique has been properly mastered, temperament has little opportunity to manifest itself to advantage.

A generation ago home-making and farming were occupations that anyone with a mediocre intelligence and a reasonable degree of industry was considered sufficiently equipped for. But today these two avocations occupy a secure and increasingly important place among the learned professions.

Agriculture, “dignified by the ages, as old well-nigh as the green earth itself,” has become a scientific profession alluring to men and women of brains and culture, who quickly become enthralled by its ever-expanding and fascinating possibilities. In every State in the Union we have magnificent agricultural colleges and schools of domestic science, in which are being prepared for their respective careers thousands of prospective farmers and thousands of prospective housewives. Moreover, several bills have been pending before Congress which provide for the widest possible dissemination of instruction in agriculture and domestic science (including the pure food problem) among the rural population of every county in this Nation.

This is a glorious work. The proposed instruction in agriculture is something which, as a farmer, I am particularly enthusiastic about. Yet I feel that quite as important as this will be the educational facilities in the household arts and in the highest home-making ideals, which are to be placed within reach of every housekeeper and every prospective housekeeper in this land. Just as agriculture is the basis of all our material prosperity and power, so the home is the perennial and sacred source from which emanate those potent, ennobling and refining influences, which slowly and silently have lifted man out of past savagery, and will yet, we trust, lift us out of our present state of semi-civilization—with its class war, political and business corruption and industrial brutality—on to higher and even higher stages of moral, intellectual and social development.

This is my idea of the relatedness of Conservation to the home. Is there any question that this is truly Conservation—its essence—in the minds of any member of this convention?

The second realm of opportunity which I want to point out to you is that which spreads out before us in a bewildering splendor of promise, in connection with the schooling of the young, as related to the home. We are all aware that the large majority of our common and high school teachers are women. In many of our States women vote for members of the School Board, and if a majority of them really wanted this right, there is no doubt that they would secure it everywhere. In this event it would be a comparatively easy matter for them to formulate and carry through policies of their own. Thus from the cradle to the university the education of the children is potentially in the hands of the women of this country.

This is a power which the priests of various religions frequently have endeavored to obtain on the grounds that if they were allowed to control and dominate the child’s mind during its formative period, their influence upon its after-life would be dominant and enduring. I wonder if we realize what almost unlimited power over future generations is thus entrusted to our hands. Are we, as women and mothers, exercising that power with an adequate sense of the responsibility which it places upon our shoulders?

There are now thousands and hundreds of thousands of our sex who are pining for something to do, which they can feel is entirely and splendidly worth their while. How fortunate it is, that here, already at hand, is a task which Nature, and “Man, the tyrant,” are agreed is peculiarly adapted to our particular tastes and talents. But what are we doing about it? Little as a sex, I fear, that is either significant or creditable. When not merely in a few isolated cases, but as a class, the women of America decide what they want in the way of education for their children, if they want it badly enough, there is no earthly power which can stand between them and their splendid ideal goal.

But this means work, persistent, intelligent work. First of all, in the matter of self-education, and, secondly, in that of carrying on an aggressive campaign for the education of our own sex, and, if possible, of the other sex as well.

I am beginning to get deeply concerned, not about the lack of adequate opportunities for service on the part of women, but about our failure, so far, to measure up to the incomparable opportunities which are already ours. If there is any subject in which we, as women, ought to be intensely and intelligently interested, it is in this subject of education—not in the academic sense alone, but in the broader view of character-building—upon a proper understanding and handling of which depends the very future of civilization.

This, I take it, is truly Conservation work and when thoroughly grasped, will as truly mark milestones of progress in our lifetime, as those we may leave behind in material form.

The third of these brilliant avenues of possible social service, which open before us in beautiful vistas of alluring opportunity, is one which is involved in the purchasing power of women. As a general thing, men are the wage-earners and women are the wage-spenders for the home. Nearly all of the household expenditures of the family are made by the wives and mothers of the race. It is a sad commentary upon our business ability, and our rudimentary sense of social solidarity, that so few of us have any realizing sense of the potential power over the business and industrial world, which is inherent in this our position as buyer, or spender, for the family.

I call your attention to the fact that if the women of America would pool their purchasing power, and, resisting all the blandishments of the “bargain counter” and the “sale”—based on sweat-shop labor—would demand pure goods, made and sold under sanitary and salutary conditions—more could be accomplished for the moral and material uplift of the factory-worker and the saleswoman than by the enactment of a volume of restrictive statute, the breaking of which we thoughtlessly connive at, and practically become a party to, in our mad scramble for cheapness at any cost of human degradation and wreckage.

A superb organization, known as the “Consumers’ League,” has come into being, for the express purpose of enabling men, as well as women, to utilize their purchasing power in the great work of raising the standards of the business and industrial worlds, both as to the purity of the product offered to the public and the fairness of the treatment accorded to employes.

Of all the splendid “movements” and “causes” which today invite our co-operation and support, this is one of many, which seem to me to fall naturally within our province, as wives, mothers and home-makers. It is the principle underlying this great crusade of the “Consumers’ League” and like organizations which appeal to us. As a matter of fact, this is a work for the betterment of women in the business and industrial worlds, and as a consequence improvement in the home, which we women cannot avoid doing, without definitely and publicly shirking our heavy economic and moral responsibilities, as family purveyors and budget makers. Or, in other words, as domestic chancellors of the exchequer.

Far be it from me to say that the members of our sex may not some day decide to undertake, in addition to their other duties, the heavy responsibilities of the voter and political worker. Perhaps it may transpire, that upon our planet the true super-man is woman, and that she is entirely capable of doing the man’s work as well as her own. But, in the interim, until this fact has been satisfactorily demonstrated, let us devote ourselves whole-heartedly to what is more particularly woman’s work; to those delicate and difficult tasks for which man’s clumsy fingers and prosaic processes of reasoning are unfitted and wholly inadequate. And, above all, let us be quite sure that we do our especial work—at least as well as he does his—before we insist upon taking a hand in his activities and improving upon his methods of performing his highly useful, if somewhat less exalted, functions.

It may seem in these lines of work—somewhat unique—and hitherto undefined as belonging to the realm of Conservation, that I am departing a long way from the usual addresses on that subject. But I ask your careful consideration of this subconscious knowledge of every woman’s breast, that at least every issue and question I have referred to has its foundation, in the broadest and deepest sense, in the life and action which center in the home.

In the ways which I have so hastily outlined and in other, and perhaps better ways, that may not yet have occurred to us, our great work of Conservation is destined to continue its triumphal march upward and on—in the name of the great principles upon which it is founded, and in the name of patriots, living and dead, who have labored and sacrificed to make of this, our fatherland, what, under God, it is, has been, and ever must remain—the greatest nation on earth. Because, beneath the ample folds of its unconquered flag, there live more free, happy and God-fearing people than upon any other part of the habitable globe. (Applause.)

The CHAIRMAN—I had been tempted to introduce the next speaker as a charter member of the organization of the Daughters of the American Revolution, but I was told by her that this would be considered antediluvian, so that I have not any right whatever to use the knowledge I possess. I have also been told by her friends, for I am sorry to say that until this meeting we had not known each other, that she is the personification of patriotism.

It gives me great pleasure to present to this audience the Honorary Vice-President-General of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Mrs. John R. Walker, of Kansas City, Mo.

Mrs. WALKER—Madam Chairman, and Ladies and Gentlemen: The term Conversation has become so all embracing, from the viewpoint of a Daughter of the American Revolution, it is as much a work of patriotism as that of our own great organization—the one dealing with the present and the future, the other with the past, the present and the future. The motto of the Daughters of the American Revolution is “Home and Country,” and so lofty is its ideal, so practical its work, it will be felt throughout all time, as will this broad, wise work of Conservation. The spirit of commercialism, of money worship, about in the land, is fast sapping the resources of our great country and begetting a selfishness that makes a willing sacrifice of the rightful heritage of future generations. It would seem in the order of things in this work of Conservation, that the men of our land should give special concern to its material needs, its lands, its waters, its mineral resources, and that the conservation of life should appeal as nothing else to woman, the transmitter of life—Life, a priceless boon. We protest against child labor—implore with all the tenderness, developed through mother love, to spare the child in the greed of money getting. Refuse the work of little hands, and little feet, in factories, mills, and mines, and out of your abundance make it possible for them, during the few short years of childhood, to enjoy the freedom of the bird and the butterfly, give them a memory of Nature’s blessed joys—God’s pure, sweet air; the wayside flower plucked at will, the willow-shaded stream, and all that the sweet breast of Nature offers so freely, without money and without price—to the child of poverty. The Daughters of the American Revolution are awakened to the realization that we, the home-makers, descendants of the woman of the spinning wheel, hold the destiny of a nation in our hands, that we must not only accept but consecrate ourselves to woman’s highest mission, the crowning glory of womanhood—guiding the young feet into right paths.

To give patriots to our country, we must rear patriots, train Americans for America. In our great work of patriotic education our aim is to train the youth of our land in good citizenship; teach them to battle for good laws and social conditions, and to be courageous in the fight, daring to do right in both the political and business world—thus honoring his birthright. The Daughters of the American Revolution have gathered the alien into the fold of the children of the republic, to make of them true Americans, do for them the best we know how; and many a lesson we can learn from them of thrift, industry and patience under discouragement. In my own State opportunity came to such men as Carl Schurz and Joseph Pulitzer, poor emigrants, who became pre-eminent in our country’s history. The privileges of the American woman go hand in hand with her responsibilities, in her zeal for home and country; she is pointing the way, realizing that our children have a great work before them, a great problem to solve.

The Jewish dramatist, Zangwill, says: “To think that the same great torch of liberty, which threw its light across all the broad seas and lands into my little garret in Russia, is shining also for all those other weeping millions of Europe, shining wherever men hunger, or are oppressed, shining over the starving villages of Italy and Ireland; over the swarming cities of Poland; over the ruined farms of Roumania; over the shambles of Russia. What is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem, where all races come to worship and look back, compared to the glory of America, where all races and nations came to labor and look forward.” America! great charity of God to the human race.

Conservation of life! As I stand before the shafts erected at Arlington and Richmond and read to the memory of sixteen thousand who fell in battle, to the memory of eight hundred unknown dead, my very soul cries out against war. Eight hundred unknown dead! Can you not see the long procession of anguished, broken-hearted mothers, waiting and watching—watching and waiting, and hoping? Our law makers oppose legislative measures advocating universal peace. How can they with our Civil War yet fresh in memory, the nations of the earth yet shuddering over the horrors of the war between Russia and Japan? The heart sickens at the memory of the undying hatred of the human heart; the blood thirst for blood in its brutal frenzy, sacrificing her young men—the hope of a nation—and all for what? One more island, perhaps, or insignificant kingdom. A war involving principle, as our Revolutionary War, hundreds of years afterward excites the most passionate interest and feeling; but wars for power, and possession, the world cries out against. The time has come to sheathe the sword and spare mankind. The vast expenditure of money for more destructive engines of warfare, for the slaughter of men, would go so far in our work for humanity, the helpless, the unfortunate, the struggling. War affects not only those who bear arms, but those who stay at home; the entire country is affected. War retards progress, paralyzes effort; ambition cannot feed a sorrow, hands are listless and lax when the heart is heavy. Mrs. Browning’s Italian mother wails: “Both boys dead, one of them shot by the sea in the East, and one of them shot in the West by the sea. Dead! both my boys. If your flag takes all heaven, with its white, green and red, for what end is it done, if we have not a son?”

On one occasion, a distinguished Confederate general was a guest at our table; he had fought from the beginning to the close of the Civil War. The little boy of the family gazed upon him with awe and admiration. To know and be close to a great soldier, one who had commanded armies and fought many battles, was indeed glory for a small boy. After gazing upon him long and steadily, he startled the assembled company by saying: “General, how many men have you killed?” We gasped in horror, wondering what the reply would be. Quickly the General responded, “I don’t know that I have killed any.”

We read “The Charge of the Light Brigade”; “Scots Who Ha’e Wi’ Wallace Bled,” and other stirring poems of war, and see only the glory of it. Death by shot and shell and sabre stroke is heroic; but the question of a little child startles us with the question of our individual responsibility; we are brought face to face with the words engraven on the tablets of stone, “Thou shalt not kill.”

Universal peace is no longer a dream. The peace court at The Hague is established, and marks an epoch in international law. Let us not cease in our efforts until the pressure of strong public sentiment becomes so compelling, legislation will be favorable. Our country is the beacon light; she stands for justice, for freedom, for God; she is the messenger of the Prince of Peace, is elected to proclaim with trumpet call, peace to all the nations of the earth and the islands of the sea.

I cannot let this opportunity pass without asking this influential body of men to throw the weight of its great influence in favor of another matter taken up by the Daughters of the American Revolution—the desecration of the flag. I was appointed by our President-General Mrs. McLean, to speak on the subject before a committee of the United States Senate, and, with representatives from other patriotic societies, urged legislation upon it. It is a matter of sentiment, but what is life without sentiment? With you men laboring for your country’s welfare, see to it that our country’s emblem is held sacred, shall not be used as an advertising medium by the soulless money-maker, who cares for naught save personal gain, who does not consider that this banner stands for this great country—“your flag and my flag.”

“And Oh! how much it holds,
Your land and my land
Secure within its folds,
Your heart, and my heart,
Beat quicker at the sight,
Sun-kissed and wind tossed the
Red and Blue and White;
The one Flag—the Great Flag—the Flag for me and you
Glorified all else besides—the Red and White and Blue.”

Wherever we fling it to the breeze, it carries a breath of freedom into every land and unto every people. Should we not hold it a sacred thing? (Continued applause.)

The CHAIRMAN—For the past two years the next speaker has been working in the General Federation as Chairman of the Department of Conservation. We have worked so closely together, I, as her adviser, and she doing the large work of the organization, that it is almost like speaking of one’s own family in introducing this speaker. I shall not try to tell of her work. We are the very best of Conservation friends to this day—Mrs. Marion A. Crocker, of Fitchburg, Mass.

Mrs. CROCKER—Madam Chairman, and Mr. President and Members of the Convention: Conservation is a term so apt that it has been borrowed and made to fit almost all lines of public work, but Conservation as applied to that department bearing its name in the General Federation means conservation of natural resources only, and that is a field so vast that we have found it all that can well be handled under one head without a chance of neglecting the very principle for which the Conservation movement was established. And then it is always easier to come back to simpler things. I do not mean exactly “simpler,” but to those that touch our lives from day to day, of which we may see the effect almost from hour to hour, and therefore it seems so unnecessary to dwell on these things that are far away. The problem of Conservation of natural resources is so wide and far extended that much of it must be solved on great government plans, and that seems to make it even more remote.

Now, we all concede that there is nothing so important as the conservation of life, of health, education and vital force, so closely connected with the life. We all grant that, and it is only because the conservation of natural resources is so closely related to these other lines that it is of any vital consequence. But, with the other side having been so strongly emphasized, and, to my sorrow, a few times I have noticed it even being decried in this conference, it seems to me it has become my bounden duty to emphasize the other side, because if we do not follow the most scientific approved methods, the most modern discoveries of how to conserve and propagate and renew wherever possible those resources which Nature in her providence has given to man for his use but not abuse, the time will come when the world will not be able to support life, and then we shall have no need of conservation of health, strength or vital force, because we must have the things to support life or else everything else is useless.