44 ADMINISTRATIVE SECTION 



days of the child's life will have been done under right 

 assistance. Then comes in the health visitor, who supple- 

 ments the advice already given by the midwife, who carries 

 on the counsel and teaching to the mother throughout the 

 whole of the first year of the infant's life. In connection 

 with this we cannot lay too much importance upon the 

 advisability of increasing the number of those infant consul- 

 tations which are, happily, becoming established all over 

 the country in our big centres of population, for however 

 well trained the health visitors may be, there is a certain 

 amount of medical work in connection with the care of 

 infancy and the protection of infancy that can only be pro- 

 perly done at such consultations or by medical men or 

 women. Then the last aspect of direct child welfare work 

 with which we are concerned is 'to remember that it is not 

 confined to the first year of life, but that it goes right up to 

 the period of school life, and we have to consider measures 

 for stopping the gap between infancy and school life, filling 

 up that gap by continued child consultations and other 

 means which will enable us to treat at the earliest possible 

 stage, and as far -as practicable prevent, the diseases which 

 are found to such an enormous extent, when the valuable 

 system of school medical inspection comes into operation. 

 Those, roughly speaking, are the branches of child welfare 

 work with which we are concerned. They are of extreme 

 importance, and their importance is becoming realized to 

 a greater extent by local authorities all over the kingdom. 

 I wish to say one word about the pre-conditions which are 

 necessary for the success of this work of child welfare. It 

 is necessary in order that child welfare work may be success- 

 ful that every child shall have in its home the elementary 

 conditions of a sanitary life. When you remember the fact 

 that, taking four average years of recent date, we have 

 differences such as between Stalybridge, with an infant 

 mortality of 149, down to others in which the mortality 

 nearly reaches the figure of 50 per 1,000, which has been 

 mentioned already by one speaker as approximating to the 

 ideal, you will see that there is much to be done. Those 

 differences are not due to the fact that in the towns with the 

 highest mortality there is a total absence of child welfare 

 work, but owing to the fact that the conditions of a decent 

 sanitary life are not present in those towns or in some part 

 of those towns, and speaking as I do this morning to repre- 

 sentatives of sanitary authorities from various parts of the 

 country^ I wish to say a preliminary word to impress upon 

 you the importance, whilst doing all the direct child welfare 

 work which lies before you, of not neglecting the duties of 



