y undertake the duties of maternity or
motherhood? Is she physically fit to give birth to a child? After it is
all over can she devote the time to permit nature to do her share of the
physical readjustment? Can she afford, or will she be permitted to
remain in bed long enough to allow conditions to be favorable to
getting up without "taking a chance"? Inasmuch as her muscular tone is
poor, her strength depleted, her vitality wasted, her ambition and hope
at a low ebb, nature should be given a longer time, under the most
favorable hygienic and domestic conditions, to help in the problem of
readjustment, because her whole future, as an efficient machine, as
wife, as mother, as home-maker, and as an economic individuality, is
dependent upon how this crisis is met. This is the most important
problem which an enlightened civilization has before it. It is the
supreme eugenic task, and it is the most pressing and the most vital
question for statesmen to solve. No man can deny that the permanency of
the state is dependent upon the function of motherhood, yet motherhood
is conducted by unskilled labor--labor, the quality of which no business
would tolerate. We also know that the health of the workman has become
an economic problem. Capital finds that labor is of better quality, and
consequently more remunerative in every sense, if the environment is
conducive to happiness and health. Yet motherhood, the most important
labor in the world, upon which the very existence of the state depends,
in addition to being performed by unskilled labor, is undertaken by
physically unfit and frequently unwilling laborers, in an environment
which is a disgrace to civilization and which cannot be duplicated in
the whole realm of the brute world. This is the quality of labor, the
products of which constitute the state.

If anyone is disposed to believe that this is an over-drawn picture, let
him study the facts brought out in the recent patent medicine
investigation. It was found that one small, unimportant, quack medical
company had under treatment at one time (the day the government closed
it up) 200,000 women, suffering exclusively from female diseases. How
many similar cases must there be to support the large advertising
concerns, whose tentacles reach to the remotest corners of the country
and who limit their activity and cater to "diseases of women" only. Let
him also give some thought to the fact that no specialty in the whole
field of legi