Our generation, said to have developed a new enthusiasm for the
possibilities of child life, and to have put fresh meaning into the
phrase "children's rights," may at last have the courage to insist upon
a child's right to be well born and to start in life with its tiny body
free from disease. Certainly allied to this new understanding of child
life and a part of the same movement is the new science of eugenics with
its recently appointed university professors. Its organized societies
publish an ever-increasing mass of information as to that which
constitutes the inheritance of well-born children. When this new science
makes clear to the public that those diseases which are a direct outcome
of the social evil are clearly responsible for race deterioration,
effective indignation may at last be aroused, both against the
preventable infant mortality for which these diseases are responsible,
and against the ghastly fact that the survivors among these afflicted
children infect their contemporaries and hand on the evil heritage to
another generation. Public societies for the prevention of blindness are
continually distributing information on the care of new-born children
and may at length answer that old, confusing question "Did this man sin
or his parents, that he was born blind?" Such knowledge is becoming more
widespread every day and the rising interest in infant welfare must in
time react upon the very existence of the social-evil itself.

This new public concern for the welfare of little children in certain
American cities has resulted in a municipal milk supply; in many German
cities, in free hospitals and nurseries. New York, Chicago, Boston and
other large towns, employ hundreds of nurses each summer to instruct
tenement-house mothers upon the care of little children. Doubtless all
of this enthusiasm for the nurture of children will at last arouse
public opinion in regard to the transmission of that one type of disease