Our Common Country/Chapter 5
In my address to women voters last October, I spoke of my desire that there should be created in our government a department of public welfare. It is with some satisfaction that I am now able to say that since the election I have had opportunity to discuss that proposal with a number of leaders of liberal public thought in and out of Congress, with reference to crystallizing it into legislative accomplishment, and have found them eager to help in the constructive task.
Its accomplishment will tardily place our government on something like an equal footing with governments which have long maintained ministries of education represented in their Cabinets. While my own ideal envisages a broader scope for the new department, giving it concern with many other phases of human welfare, it is interesting to know that its creation will for the first time place this great work on a phase of dignity comparable to that given it in many other countries.
Whether we may esteem it wise or unwise, the modern mother must realize that society is disposed more and more to take from her control the training, the intellectual direction and the spiritual guidance of her children. We may well plead with the mothers to make the most for good, of the lessened opportunity they possess for molding the lives and minds of their children. Through such cooperative effort as this is, it seems to me, there is opportunity for a great service. Herein is presented the opportunity to lift up the poorer and the less fortunate to a higher level.
The mother who indefatigably seeks to train her own children rightly will be performing this service not only for her own children, but for those from other homes not so richly blessed with the finer things of life. I confess to no great satisfaction in the good fortune of those families, which, when they become sufficiently well to do, like to take their children away from the public schools and give them the doubtful advantage of more exclusive educational processes. I like the democracy of the community school and, indeed, I would like to see a greater measure of it enforced in the public schools by the elimination of those evidences of extravagance in dress and social indulgence which make for the development of something like caste within our democracy.
On the side of the teacher and the responsible authorities back of her, there must be the same ready disposition to cooperate with the home and the mother. Our public school system leaves to the home and its influence the great duty of instilling into the child those fundamental concepts of religion which are so essential in shaping the character of individual citizens, and, therefore, of the nation. That duty remains to be performed at the hearthside and will always be a peculiar prerogative of the mother. I could wish, indeed, that our nation might have a revival of religious spirit along these lines. There never was a time when the world stood in more need than it does now of the consolations and reassurances which only a firm religious faith can have. It is a time of uncertainty, of weakened faith in the efficiency of institutions, of industrial systems, of economic hypothesis, of dictum and dogma. Whatever our realm, let not our engrossment with those things which are concerned merely with matter and mind distract from proper attention to those which are of the spirit and the soul.
It has been demonstrated to astonishing and alarming certainty that a large proportion of school children and even of adults suffer from under-nourishment. Perhaps in the case of most adults the fault is of the individual rather than society. With children, however, it is otherwise. If society has permitted the development of a system under which the citizens of to-morrow suffer real privation to-day, then the obligation is upon society to right that wrong, to insure some measure of justice to the children, who are not responsible for being here.
I am not of those who believe legislation can find panaceas for all ills, but on the other hand I am not of those who fear to undertake through legislation the formulation of new programs.
I firmly believe that our country, along with others that claim a share in the world's leadership, has lately achieved one victory in behalf of a better understanding and more intelligent grasp of these problems. I refer to the bestowal upon women of full participation in the privileges and obligations of citizenship. With her large part wider in influence in the world of affairs, I think we shall see woman and her finer spiritual instincts at length leading mankind to higher planes of religion, of humanism and of ennobling spirituality.
Healthful mothers amid fit conditions for maternity, healthful, abundantly nourished children amid fit conditions for development mentally and physically—all made certain by the generation of to-day in its concern for to-morrow, will guarantee a citizenship from the soil of America which will be the guarantee of American security and the American fulfillment.