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13
At its best, then, official action can only offer "advice"
when medical comforts and liberal nursing diet is required.
The one seems a poor substitute for the other, but the law says
you may give the one and be surcharged if you attempt the
other.
At its worst, official action and inspection during a lying-in
period may be such a meddlesome officiousness at a time when
perfect rest and quiet is so essential, as to amount to an outrageous
interference with the privacy and comfort of poor
people. It will never be perpetrated on the rich and well to do.
It is obvious, then, so far as we have gone with this
retrogade and mischievous measure of notification of births,
that neither at its best nor worst does it permit of anything
more than " inspection " and " advice."
It is certain that these two things alone will never begin
to touch the remotest fringe of the question of "How to correct
a heavy infantile death rate?"
Having so far tried to make the situation a little more
clear by pointing out briefly and not, of course, exhaustively
the vastness and complexity of the problem under consideration,
and incidentally illustrating how a serious matter is so lightly
talked about and neglected by those who should be better
informed, I now come to the consideration of what might
peihaps be done under existing conditions to mitigate this evil
by local voluntary effort.
I would therefore submit, especially in view of this Conference
with the Health Society, whether it is not possible to
make some attempt to put into practical shape what many of
the speakers appeared earnestly to desire, but did not seem to
realise even theoretically how to set to work upon.
Whilst carefully guarding myself from assenting to fallacious
statements about pulling down the death rate in a few
weeks, or entering into it as a kind of relaxation from other
duties, I am firmly of opinion that a voluntary association