The Endowment of Motherhood does not attract the bureaucratic type of reformer because it offers a minimum chance of meddlesome interference with people’s lives.  There would be no chance of “seeking out” anybody and applying benevolent but grim compulsions on the strength of it.  In spite of its wide scope it would be much less of a public nuisance than that Wet Children’s Charter, which exasperates me every time I pass a public-house on a rainy night.  But, on the other hand, there would be an enormous stimulus to people to raise the quality of their homes, study infantile hygiene, seek out good schools for them—­and do their duty as all good parents naturally want to do now—­if only economic forces were not so pitilessly against them—­thoroughly and well.

DOCTORS

In that extravagant world of which I dream, in which people will live in delightful cottages and ground rents will serve instead of rates, and everyone will have a chance of being happy—­in that impossible world all doctors will be members of one great organisation for the public health, with all or most of their income guaranteed to them:  I doubt if there will be any private doctors at all.

Heaven forbid I should seem to write a word against doctors as they are.  Daily I marvel at the wonders the general practitioner achieves, having regard to the difficulties of his position.

But I cannot hide from myself, and I do not intend to hide from anyone else, my firm persuasion that the services the general practitioner is able to render us are not one-tenth so effectual as they might be if, instead of his being a private adventurer, he were a member of a sanely organised public machine.  Consider what his training and equipment are, consider the peculiar difficulties of his work, and then consider for a moment what better conditions might be invented, and perhaps you will not think my estimate of one-tenth an excessive understatement in this matter.

Nearly the whole of our medical profession and most of our apparatus for teaching and training doctors subsist on strictly commercial lines by earning fees.  This chief source of revenue is eked out by the wanton charity of old women, and conspicuous subscriptions by popularity hunters, and a small but growing contribution (in the salaries of medical officers of health and so forth) from the public funds.  But the fact remains that for the great mass of the medical profession there is no living to be got except at a salary for hospital practice or by earning fees in receiving or attending upon private cases.