The Rising Value of a BabyBy Mabel Potter Daggett(In “Pictorial Review.”)
By Mabel Potter Daggett
(In “Pictorial Review.”)
Only a mother counted her jewels yesterday, you see. Today, 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 you didn’t seem to miss Jimmie’s father and some of the others who had gone to the war. Jimmie belongs to one of those three hundred thousand London families who are obliged to live in one- and two-room tenements. Five or six, perhaps it was five, little previous brothers and sisters, waited on the stair landing outside the door until the midwife in attendance ushered them in to welcome the new arrival. Now Jimmie is the stuff from which soldiers are made, either soldiersof war or soldiers of industry. And however you look at the future, his country’s going to need Jimmie. He is entered in the great new ledger which has been opened by his government. The Notification of Births Act, completed by Parliament in 1915, definitely put the British baby on a business basis. Every child must now, within thirty-six hours of its advent, be listed by the local health authorities. Jimmie was.
And he was thereby automatically linked up with the great national child-saving campaign. Since then, so much as a fly in his milk is a matter of solicitude to the borough council. If he sneezes, it’s heard in Westminster. And it’s at least worried about there.