MILK SUPPLY : DISCUSSION 225 



request from their dairy for a Milk Commission in Boston 

 was what brought the Commission into existence. For the 

 last eight years she had been working with all her powers 

 on the subject of clean milk. She was exceedingly glad that 

 Dr. Coit had called attention to the dairy farmer outside 

 New York who helped with those doctors years ago in the 

 beginning of that splendid clean milk work the getting of 

 certified milk which was educational, and which perhaps did 

 its best work in the setting of the new standard. During the 

 last three months she had had a very unusual opportunity 

 of study. The Governor of Massachusetts appointed her as 

 a member of the Agricultural Commission a large body of 

 people who had come from the States to study the question 

 of co-operation. As a dairy farmer she had, of course, very 

 special interest in that side, also in the medical side of the 

 question. Beginning in Italy early in May, going as far 

 east as Hungary and as far west as Ireland, where she had 

 been able to see the splendid work done among the peasants 

 and the dairy farmers by Her Excellency the Countess of 

 Aberdeen with her own eyes. She knew whereof she spoke 

 from the farmer's point of view, and the farmer's point of 

 view had not been presented that day. She wanted to say 

 with all the emphasis she could just two things. In the 

 first place she wanted to say that in the different countries 

 there existed a different need. They could not say of the 

 same thing that it would fit conditions in England and con- 

 ditions in the States, or in other countries there must be 

 flexibility of machinery underneath certain fundamental 

 facts, and that was one matter she asked them to consider 

 that it was not wholly a sanitary matter. As a dairy farmer, 

 with all the experience she had tried to get in this and other 

 countries, she was convinced that it was also an economic 

 question. As a dairy farmer she asked the doctors to 

 remember that in all this programme for clean milk in all 

 countries from the top downwards there were also farmers 

 working from the bottom upwards, who wanted to work 

 with the doctors. The greatest privilege they could have 

 was to co-operate with the doctors, for they realized that 

 this work was one which was very closely associated with 

 the health of the people. They asked for that privilege, and 

 in this great combination which was going on all over the 

 country they asked the leadership of the doctors. If the 

 public were to be educated it certainly was the doctors to 

 whom the farmers and the women workers must appeal. It 

 was not alone a question of health; it was also a question of 

 economics, and if the dairy people were to live there were 

 questions of dairy economics and of medical economics 



