148 ADMINISTRATIVE SECTION 



story of the mother who gave her child beefsteak or 

 radishes and tea (he was not sure which), and who, when 

 remonstrated with, said, " I ought to know. It is my child; 

 I have buried eight," and so she thought she ought to know. 

 (Laughter.) They did not want the mothers to bury any 

 of them. Local authorities' work should be educative. 

 He was greatly interested in listening to their friends from 

 overseas, and hearing what they had to tell them. With 

 regard to what Miss MacMurchy had told them, he was 

 very pleased to hear how things were going on in Canada. 

 He only hoped and believed that the figures of infant 

 mortality in that country which she had given them were 

 excessive, and no doubt by their children's welfare system 

 they would be able to find out exactly where they were. 

 Qne was almost tempted to say, on hearing Miss Mac- 

 Murchy, that this played-out old country was not so bad 

 after all. As he said, they welcomed their friends from 

 overseas, and he was pleased they were able to compare 

 notes one with another, for he was sure that their Colonial 

 and other friends could teach them some things they would 

 be glad to know. 



Mr. B. TURNER (Dewsbury) said that to a large extent 

 he agreed with some of the papers and he disagreed with 

 the conclusions of many of the speeches that had been made 

 since the papers were given. There seemed to be hanging 

 around the Conference an atmosphere of patronage of the 

 working classes men and women and, in his view, that 

 patronage was not for the welfare of the State as a whole. 

 God never meant that the child of any parent should pass 

 away for want of medical attention. As long as sustenance 

 was at the command of those who had money and not at 

 the command of those who had not, so long would they 

 have children dying at an early age; so long would they 

 have weakly mothers, who could not bear children as suc- 

 cessfully as those could who were blessed with a share of 

 this world's goods. As long as there were three million 

 women workers whose average wages ran down from 125. 

 per week, so long were they bound to have a large body 

 of children dying the first year or the first five years of 

 their existence, and therefore it might be well to get deeper 

 down than the medical side of the question. He did not 

 disregard the medical side of the question in any way, but 

 they must see if they could not make the prospective mothers 

 and fathers of the future generation fitted to have children 

 in the proper way. When Mr. Burns that morning said 

 something about " cleanly bred/' he (the speaker) abso- 

 lutely agreed with him. It was not often that he agreed 



