696 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



dignant farm motlier demanded reasons. They were quickly forthcom- 

 ing: enlarged tonsils, adenoids, flabby muscles, trace of tuberculosis and 

 so on; with not a single word about silken hair or eyes of heavenly 

 blue. One of the doctors took the farm mother aside, handed her 

 pamphlets and books on the care and feeding of babies, explained that 

 the contest was for health, and not for beauty, and then bade her take 

 hope, follow the prescribed course of daily routine and bring her baby 

 back the next year. 



That little rejected laddie from the farm, carefully reared on the 

 outlined course of exercises and dietetics the ensuing year, won first 

 prize in a class of more than forty entries at the contest held at the 

 Iowa State Fair in 1912. 



"So you see," said the little gray lady, "we can breed our babies with 

 just as good and just as apparent results as we have long bred our pigs." 



That is how it came about that the dignified legislators of a state 

 as great and as rich as Iowa decided to appropriate $75,000 for a Child 

 Welfare building, Iowa being the first thus formally to recognize the 

 new campaign, just as it was the first to hold such a contest. There are 

 figures a-plenty to prove the necessity, the crying need, of just such a 

 campaign and just such recognition. Consider these, for instance: 

 There are in Iowa 7,545,000 hogs, one-sixth of which are suffering from 

 cholera. Immediately an insistent demand goes up for $50,000 to suppress 

 this disease, for the hogs are worth $12,000,000. There are in Iowa, 

 likewise, 258,000 babies and children under five years of age, one-fifth 

 of whom will be dead within the coming five years, following the ratio 

 proven by medical science. A child, well born, is estimated under the 

 law to have a value of $500, a total for the state $129,000,000, one-fifth of 

 which, or more than $25,000,000, will be lost, as against $12,000,000 on 

 pigs. Why, then, argued the little gray lady and her determined co- 

 workers, should the legislators look aghast at an appropriation of $75,000 

 for a campaign to save babies when they thought nothing of appropriating 

 $50,000 with which simply to check disease among pigs. Babies versus 

 pigs, pigs versus babies, looked at either way there seemed to be 

 merit, indeed, in the proposition to pay as much attention and give 

 as much money to the greatest crop of all, which heretofore had been 

 absolutely overlooked. 



The idea came quite unexpectedly, it was of small beginnings. It 

 originated in the brain of the little country woman who is devoting her 

 time to its propaganda. She was in charge of a booth at her home county 

 fair, just such a fair as is held annually in hundreds of rural counties; 

 pumpkins and slow horse races, hogs and crazy quilts, homemade jelly 

 and threshing machines snorting all over the lot. "I was listening to 

 the talk that drifted in, in snatches, of prizes won on hogs and horses, 

 sheep and cattle and poultry," says the originator of the whole affair, 

 "the same talk I had been hearing at every fair for ten years. Suddenly 

 I became conscious of how often I had heard this talk about the won- 

 derful improvement that had been made in the conditions of live stock 

 in that length of time. Just at this minute a woman with a fretful baby 

 in her arms stopped near me to rest. A child of three clung to the 



