EDUCATION IN INFANT HYGIENE: DISCUSSION 301 



rapidly a growing organism as a girl that if all the impulses 

 and all the circulation and all the nutritional power of the 

 body were going to the head some portion must suffer, and 

 she believed it was the breast and the reproductive organs 

 which suffered under that strain. She was delighted to 

 hear that Dr. Truby King had such support in New 

 Zealand, and wished they had it in her country, but she 

 believed they were not awake on the matter in the United 

 States. She would make a plea from the ethical side, for 

 there was an interest from the point of view of the sacred- 

 ness of reproduction and the sacredness of life which in her 

 country was terribly unheeded. She was sorry to hear of 

 the high pressure education in Australia. In her country 

 they had a machine system in which they fed the children 

 into the hopper, turned the handle with great rapidity, and 

 in a few months turned out the survivors. She was in 

 hopes that this was limited to her own country, but she 

 feared it was widespread. To show the speed at which they 

 were geared she might say that in a school in which she 

 had been Medical Inspector in Chicago they had about 48 

 per cent, retardation. Dr. Booth brought out another 

 matter, namely, the separation of the parent and the child. 

 If the English-speaking Colonies could see that higher 

 education could separate the parent and the child then they 

 might realize what it did for the foreign families. A family 

 came over from Poland and the children went to school; in 

 three or four months they were speaking English, and the 

 girls had adopted the dress of the country. At home were 

 the mother and father, neither of them knowing the lan- 

 guage, and the mother still wearing her native dress. She 

 became despised. Presently the girl went to work, and she 

 knew dozens of cases in which the foreign mother did not 

 even know where the girl worked. They Americanized too 

 rapidly in her country, and their high system of education 

 was one of the things which was breaking up the family. 

 They took away their foreign standards; they did not 

 recognize their old standards; and perhaps they did not give 

 them any new ones. They did to a certain extent break up 

 the family, and here again came the ethical consideration. 

 Could they throw that great mass of children into their 

 economic life with safety" if they took away the restraining 

 hand of the parent ? She did not think they could. 



