se of their protective function in easing family discipline and
in gaining relief from harsh conditions affecting childhood. Theirs
was then no open fight for the well-being of their offspring, and
often not a wise effort to that end, but ancient song and story all
show that childhood and youth depended upon the mother-love in crises
of family experience and that without such refuge many young lives
would have been utterly sacrificed.

=Social Elements in Modern Protection of Children.=--To-day the
dangers to which babies and children are exposed are more subtle in
form and more complex in action. They are less within than without the
average home. They are those that give the high death-rate of infants,
the crippled limbs of children, the weakness of body and defectiveness
of mind and feebleness or perversion of moral nature that make so many
human beings unequal to life's demands. They are the dangers, personal
and social, summed up in the antitheses of "health" and "disease," of
"normal" and "abnormal." Not that the dangers so indicated are new but
rather that we are newly aware of them. Not that savage or early
civilized life had conditions more favorable to health and normality
but that the easier modern conditions save alive many who in harsher
times would have died in babyhood. Moreover, we are beginning at last
to set a standard, in ever-clearer outline, of what is health and of
what is normality in physical, mental, and moral human life. Moreover,
we are seeing as never before that the dangers that beset the child
to-day are not those from which the mother alone, or the individual
father and mother working together, can adequately protect. They are
dangers that only society can prevent and that society alone can
abolish.

=Women's Leadership in Social Protection.=--Why, then, do we say that
the protective function of individual motherhood is still demanded and
still a large part of the modern mother's obligation? Because she is
to-day the one most clearly required, in our own country at least, to
summon the social forces to lessen or abolish those dangers to which
children are exposed. The action of the solitary, primitive mother
fighting off the despoiler of her child does not much resemble the
banding together of modern women by the hundreds and by the thousands
to abolish typhoid fever in some city in which it has become endemic
through the greed of manufacturers who pollute the water supply. It
is, howeve