onal money by doing laundry and charwork. At times her
husband deserted her. His earnings amounted to $1.70 a day, while a
fifteen-year-old son earned $1.10 in a coal mine.

One searches in vain for some picture of sacred motherhood, as depicted
in popular plays and motion pictures, something more normal and
encouraging. Then one comes to the bitter realization that these, in
very truth, are the "normal" cases, not the exceptions. The exceptions
are apt to indicate, instead, the close relationship of this
irresponsible and chance parenthood to the great social problems of
feeble-mindedness, crime and syphilis.

Nor is this type of motherhood confined to newly arrived immigrant
mothers, as a government report from Akron, Ohio, sufficiently
indicates. In this city, the government agents discovered that more than
five hundred mothers were ignorant of the accepted principles of
infant feeding, or, if familiar with them, did not practise them. "This
ignorance or indifference was not confined to foreign-born mothers.... A
native mother reported that she gave her two-weeks-old baby ice cream,
and that before his sixth month, he was sitting at the table `eating
everything."' This was in a town in which there were comparatively few
cases of extreme poverty.

The degradation of motherhood, the damnation of the next generation
before it is born, is exposed in all its catastrophic misery, in the
reports of the National Consumers' League. In her report of living
conditions among night-working mothers in thirty-nine textile mills
in Rhode Island, based on exhaustive studies, Mrs. Florence Kelley
describes the "normal" life of these women:

"When the worker, cruelly tired from ten hours' work, comes home in the
early morning, she usually scrambles together breakfast for the family.
Eating little or nothing herself, and that hastily, she tumbles into
bed--not the immaculate bed in an airy bed-room with dark shades, but
one still warm from its night occupants, in a stuffy little bed-room,
darkened imperfectly if at all. After sleeping exhaustedly for an hour
perhaps she bestirs herself to get the children off to school, or care
for insistent little ones, too young to appreciate that mother is tired
out and must sleep. Perhaps later in the forenoon, she again drops into
a fitful sleep, or she may have to wait until after dinner. There is
the midday meal to get, and, if her husband cannot come home, his
dinner-pail to pack with a hot