The Daily Missoulian. [volume] (Missoula, Mont.) 1904-1961, 1913-01-01
THE BEST CONSERVATION,

With this, the opening day of the new year, the govern
nent of the United States actually begins the work of saw
ing babies. The new children's bureau of the department
Of commerce and labor, which was founded in spite of the
opposition and derision Of the tories in the senate, timed its
organization. to set the force in its field at work immedi-
ately after Christmas. The first campaign will be made
A bulletin of the department Of commerce and labor tells
what the first steps will be. The bureau proposes 10 base
its work Of saving babies on a knowledge Of what it is that
kills the little ones. According to the statistician Of the
bureau, DR.. Cressy L. Wilbur, 100000 children under one
year of age die in the United States every year. That
means that of every eight babies born one never reaches
the short span of twelve months.
OF course, the closer the baby is to the danger center the
greater is its danger; According to Doctor Wilbur
babies in poor neighborhoods in American cities for which
figures are available die at the rate of 373 Der 1000 babies
under one year Of age, while the corresponding rate for
babies in good residence quarters in the same city is 1856
Now, the purpose of the first campaign Of the %children's
bureau is to collect the information which will answer
problems of baby saving; why 3z5 babies in every 1000
in certain cities die before they are a year old, while in
other sections OF the same cities the rate is reduced to 156
per 1000. And from this it will be another step to learn
what conditions reduce the infant death rate in New Zea-
land to 6s, while in this country it is Twice that figure:
personal Investigation by its field workers. These will be
tactfu1 women, who will go to to the homes where babies
rich and poor alike. The investigators have no way Of en-
forcing answers. They do not want to enforce them.
They hope to appeal to the mother instincts to help them
gather Information as to the health Of the parents, the
housing conditions, the milk supply, the manner Of feeding,
the general care OF the baby and the economic situation OF
the family.
A tabulation Of these returns, with comparisons between
the districts in which the mortality is high and those in
which it is low, will be likely to show what the conditions
are that kill babies.
This is the first work Of the childrens bureau, which was
fought SO bitterly by the tories. 1t took five years to get
the bill through the senate. Two Of the greatest obstacles
to it's progress we're Senator Bailey, tory democrat, and
Senator Hepburn, tory republican. Bailey's most notable
jeer at the bill was that it put children on a level with
pigs the foundation for this remark being that the gov
eminent for many years has collected and disseminated in
formation on the care of pigs. Pigs are property, and
therefore to the tory mind the government is filling a high
function when it helps to conserve them. But children
are only human beings, and the tory sees in any attempt to
extend the governments relation toward them only dan
gerous vagaries, political nostruns, an attack on the consti-
tuition and a menace to the institutions that the fathers
handed down to us.
The object of the bureau is the conservation of child
hood. This is a section OF the great plan for the conserva-
ton of the human resources OF the nation, which was first
made a party principle when the progressives wrote it into
their contract with the people made at Chicago when Theo-
dore Roosevelt was nominated.
The children's bureau is only a leaf from the progressive
book, although an important leaf. And the young women
who are sent abroad in the land this week to begin the cam
paign for the babies are just the same kind Of menace to
the constitution and to republican institutions as will be all
the other progressive nstrumentalities when they are put
into operation.