30 



OPENING SESSION 



insufficient feeding. My own view is that more wages, unless 

 wisely spent, would be a disadvantage with some people; 

 but nothing delights me in this connection more than to see 

 that, accompanying the high wages of the last ten or fifteen 

 years, there has been wiser spending. All foreigners, 

 Americans, Canadians, and others, who now come to this 

 London in which I live and move and have my being, and 

 of which I am very very proud, marvel that, considering its 

 size, London is so sober. The fact is that in this great 

 city, and everywhere throughout the country, during the 

 last fifteen or twenty years, the higher wages are being 

 attended by a wiser spending, which has been a great factor 

 in the improvement of health. 



Now, Sir Thomas, we ought at a Conference like this 

 to think not only of the mothers and the children. After all, 

 the father is the breadwinner, he is the father of the 

 mother's child, and I do think the time has arrived when 

 you worthy ladies and gentlemen who have been concen- 

 trating on the child and the mother during the last six or 

 seven years might give a little of your attention to the 

 fathers of the children. Nothing, I think, would be more 

 beneficial to your movement than for a few enterprising 

 young ladies to hold dinner-hour open-air meetings outside 

 the big factory gates, and tell the fathers who ought to be 

 \>\ ^husbands and to their credit the bulk of them wish to be 

 C that it is their duty as individuals to guarantee proper treat- 

 ment of their wives so far as they can. Society owes it to 

 the future to see that the mothers and the children should 

 be healthy and strong! The marvel to me is that mothers 

 and children have survived as well as they have considering 

 their environment, and we who are here, consisting as we 

 do of the more comfortable section of society, ought__to see 

 to it that the poor are not allowed to suffer through any 

 neglect or ignorance which we can remove. 



I put this to you not as sanitarians, doctors, and medical 

 reformers, but as ratepayers. Forty per cent, of our 

 pauperism and our total pauperism costs over fifteen 

 millions a year is due to widowhood and orphanhood. One 

 of every three widows who come on the Poor Law comes 

 through the illness of the breadwinner or of some of the 

 family. I am at the present moment the foster-father to 

 270,000 Poor Law children, many of them very young. 

 That is one side of my interest in this subject. I want my 

 family to diminish rapidly. We are getting them out of the 

 workhouse as quickly as we can turn the healthy young 

 rascals out. I do not want so many foster-children, and if 

 this Conference continues for the next seven years the 



