PART VI

CHAPTER XI

FOREIGN EDUCATIONAL INTERESTS.

Argentina.

BUENOS AYRES has set an example in business enterprise that may well be copied by many older and presumably further advanced cities. Realizing the importance of the opening of the Panama Canal as an opportunity for worldwide trade expansion, it has decided to spend $40,000,000 upon the improvement and enlargement of its port facilities. What this may mean in the way of stimulating trade, industry, and the general welfare cannot easily be estimated. That it will give this port facilities for docking and handling freight which will make it exceptionally attractive to the unattached ("tramp") steamers, in which the great bulk of the world's commerce is now carried, is evident. The ports that afford the best and quickest means of changing cargoes are the ones these steamers will frequent, because each day saved in this way tends toward the opportunity for additional voyages during the year and therefore toward extra earning capacity. And increased business for the port should tend to a prosperity and progress that should be reflected in the schools for its people.

Australia.

HOW IT CARES FOR ITS POOR CHILDREN.-In the Contemporary Review for October, Edith Sellers gives a most interesting account of what South Australia has been doing for its children. Until in the early eighties South Australia regarded and treated its destitute children as little paupers. But realizing through the rapid spread of pauperism that this form of relief was causing the very trouble they desired to cure, the government passed the excellent law of which Miss Sellers speaks as follows:

No matter now how poor or degraded a child is, he or she does not rank as a pauper and may not be lodged in a pauper institution to suffer the degradation of such a life. In fact, normal children may not be lodged in any institution but must be provided for in homes, "just as they would be were they being provided for by their own parents, instead of by the state." They must also be brought up in the country amidst wholesome surroundings and where they may have a chance to lead free, happy human lives. There is a State Children's Council which is virtually a government department that takes care of their relief. This council appoints local committees to act as care-takers of these children and to see that they are properly housed, clothed, and fed, and that they attend school regularly, and are treated kindly. The council can take under its care any child who is unruly, a truant, or a beggar, or any whose parents are vagrants, drunkards, or criminals, or who have forfeited their claims to their children by allowing them to live in unwholesome surroundings. Of any such Miss Sellers says, "His children are lost to him until such time as he can prove that he has changed his ways and may be trusted to bring them up properly.

A child is boarded out under a subsidy system until it is 13 and then on a service system until it is 18 or in the case of certain girls until 21. "Under both the subsidy system and the service, the council's wards are lodged with respectable working-class foster-parents, who, in the case of subsidy children, must live within easy walking distance of a good school." The laws are stringent in dealing with those who deal neglectfully or wrongfully with these wards of the state. During the service period, which begins at 13, the child practically becomes an apprentice, and pay must be given for its services. If a boy, the fosterfather must be a farmer or a skilled artisan, and part of his wages must be turned over to the council, which deposits it for him in the savings bank. The foster-mother of a service girl must teach her housewifery, how to cook, clean and wash; she must teach her also how to make her own clothes; perhaps, too, if she can, how to trim her own hats. "The law requires her not only to turn the girl, so far as she can, into a good servant, but also to fit

her to be a good citizen, a good wife and mother." These arrangements have been working admirably for both girls and boys, and South Australia is accomplishing its set purpose of having no paupers in the land. Instead of pauperizing the children she is turning them into self-respecting, self-reliant, thrifty, hard-working men and women.

Belgium.

MOTHERHOOD INSTRUCTION.-Although the social and economic conditions of the poor in Europe are far less favorable than in the United States, the importance of surrounding motherhood and early infancy with proper conditions is well recognized there. Where so many of the men are needed for the army and where the industrial competition is so severe, motherhood must be protected and infant life not unnecessarily endangered. With the wider entrance of woman into the industries, and with her increasing social and economic importance, is coming a recognition of the fact that in the protection of the mother lies much of the welfare of the nation. The welfare of the mother and that of the child are so inseparable that consideration of the health of one necessarily involves interest in the hygienic care of the other. Europe has fewer free hospitals than America, but there are a number of institutions which have for their specific purpose the combined care of mothers and their babies.

One of the best of these institutions is Doctor Miele's Euvre d'Assistance Maternelle in Ghent. A large part of the population of this city is employed in textile mills. Many married women are employed in the factories, where the hours are long, the wages low, and the infant deathrate correspondingly high. An article by Theodate L. Smith in the Pedagogical Seminary for March states that until ten years ago about a third of all the children born in Ghent died before completing the first year of life. "In 1910 Doctor Miele set himself the task of devising some means of checking this waste of infant life, due in large measure to poverty, ignorance, and oppressive social conditions." His plans have been worked out mainly along the following lines: 1. He established a free clinic for mothers and babies

in which advice and treatment for both sick and well were offered. 2. It being difficult to procure pure milk in Ghent, and when procurable being too dear for many mothers to purchase, he secured the interest and aid of the Bureau of Charities which receives appropriations for its work from the city. Through this bureau milk is furnished free to those who are too poor to pay for it. 3. The work of instructing mothers is carried on in the dispensary by means of special health talks illustrated by lantern slides, as well as by the individual suggestions and criticisms that are made in connection with any professional advice that may be given. These talks, demonstrations, and suggestions indicate the proper method of bathing a baby and all the various processes necessary to its physical welfare. Occasionally there are exhibitions of hygienic baby clothes of a very cheap and simple character and a display of cheaply constructed cradles or bassinets made of fruit-crates and other inexpensive materials. "Mothers, who have visited the dispensary long enough to learn how to care for their children, visit others of their own class, passing on the instruction and, in time of need, helping those with sick children." 4. A very important section of the work consists of a course given to girls of 14 to 18. This consists of a simple course in anatomy and physiology, practical courses in the preparation of sterilized milk and infant foods, practice in the dispensary work of weighing infants, making charts and keeping temperature and other records, and finally a course in the crèche where each pupil has for a time the entire charge of a baby.

The Kaiserin Auguste Victoria Haus in Charlottenburg, a suburb of Berlin, does somewhat similar work for mothers and infants. But it is more of "a physiological institute, whose object is the investigation of all problems relating to motherhood and infancy, with the ultimate aim of scientifically determining the best conditions for the production and rearing of healthy children." The Allaitement-Maternal and Mutualité Maternelle of Paris care for working women and the wives of working men for several months preceding and during childbirth. Both of these organizations have extended their work into other cities of France. They also both work in conjunction with the Consultation

de Nourrissons, which consists of a series of schools and dispensaries having for their object training in intelligent motherhood, the furnishing of properly prepared milk, and the giving of advice.

Bulgaria.

The declaration of war against Turkey by Montenegro on the afternoon of October 8 centred the attention of the civilized world on the Balkan States. Especially has it called attention to Bulgaria, which has so uniformly and so swiftly been sucessful in its military movements since it a few days later joined in the battle against the Turkish arms. In an article in the Review of Reviews for December, Albert Sonnichsen shows the rapid progress made by Bulgaria within recent years and some of the reasons why her march on Constantinople was so generally successful. Of the four distinct races peopling the Balkans-Slavs, Turks, Greeks, and Rumanians-the Slavs are in great majority, and of the Slavs the Bulgars. "By themselves alone they probably outnumber all the other nationalities together. But their dominating influence in Balkan affairs Mr. Sonnichsen attributes more to temperamental qualities than to numbers. Of all the Christian nations that succumbed to the Turkish invasion of Europe the Bulgars, he says, were the most completely overcome. But it was not until their unyielding leaders were destroyed that they were reduced to serfdom and turned over to the care of the Greek clergy. The Patriarch of the Greek church determined to Hellenize them; so he destroyed all of the old Slavic literature and forbade them to speak any other tongue than Greek or to send their children to any but Greek schools. This they refused to do; so they rapidly became illiterate and came to be known to the Greeks as blockheads."

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Suddenly (at the close of the Russo-Turkish War, in 1878) three million of these slaves found themselves free, without masters, launched into a full national life without so much as a printed book to begin with. The jargon they spoke was not even a language, only a degenerated dialect carried down from the old Slavic through many generations of peasant households. All the knowledge necessary to the organization of a national structure-the art of govern