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12
This incident condenses and illustrates, as it were, the
whole question of keeping alive and breeding from unfits. A
slum produced population can only produce a generation of
weedy stunts, and is important in this question for the reason
that infantile mortality will never be reduced to a proper level
so long as the most weedy and unfit are permitted to increase
and multiply in a far greater ratio than do the more fit and
useful members of the community.
The question of drink, ignorance, vice and personal habits,
are those where an improvement might reasonably be expected
to take place as a result of a real sustained educational effort,
and would form the very ideal ground for the efforts of an
advisory voluntary Society formed for the purpose of carrying
into individual homes and lives the benefits of a higher standard
of personal and domestic hygiene. I have dealt later on with
what this Society may be and do.
Official inspection as at present understood and legally
applied in this country stops short of being educational and
demonstrative inside the homes and in the daily lives of the
people.
At its best it can, under such a wretched pretence as the
Notification of Births Act, be only advisory and, as you all
know, " advice " is the one thing that has no value and cannot
be disposed of to anyone with advantage.
In connection with this especial question, the advice is of
far less value than usual for the reason that hundreds of those
who need it most simply do not understand it or are not in a
position to apply what they do understand.
The admirable maxims set forth in the card bearing the
legend " Advice to Mothers" means to an intelligent person
conversant with actual conditions nothing but an exercise in an
exquisite, if somewhat bitter, irony. It would be equally
practicable to advise the daily use of gold watches and precious
jewels, ad lib.