overwork and early old age due to overstrain,
are responsible for another enormous loss? And, finally, is not
unemployment costing a billion a year to the "nation, considered as a
business firm"? This last-named loss has been calculated, for the United
States alone, as 1,300,000 years of labor time annually. If a round
million of these years are saved--if we estimate their value in profits
at the low figure of $1000 each,--we have another billion (even
allowing for 300,000 unemployable).[57]

Is it not clear that nearly every element in the community will soon
combine to do all that is humanly possible to put an end to such costly
abuses and neglect; and that conscientious and wholesale efforts to
preserve the public health and to secure industrial efficiency cannot be
a matter of the distant future, when movements in that direction have
already been initiated in Great Britain, Australia, Germany, and some
other countries? Sir Joseph Ward, Premier of New Zealand, says that the
people of that country have already calculated the value of each
child--and, on this basis, made it the subject of certain governmental
investments. He says:--

"To return to the annuity fund, apart from the assistance it gives
to the wife and children if the father is sick, it also contributes
the services of a medical man for a woman at childbirth, and the
State pays $30 for that purpose. If all of this is not needed to
pay the physician, the rest may be used for carrying on the home.
This has all been done with the view to helping the birth rate and
bringing into the world children under the most healthy conditions
possible, so that they may have a free chance of attaining man's or
woman's estate.

"We assess the value of an adult in our country as $1500. So, _from
a business standpoint and on national grounds_, we regard the
expenditure of a sum up to $30 as judicious, when the value of the
infant to the country may be fifty times that sum. Thus the small
wage earner's wife and children are provided for, and his fear
about being able to provide for a large family is decreased."
(Italics mine.)[58]

"I am of the opinion," declares Mr. Churchill, "that the State should
increasingly assume the position of the reserve employer of labor," and
that "the State must increasingly and earnestly concern itself with the
care of the sick and aged, and, above all, of th