association be, and he is hereby, given full power to aid in such work by the appointment of such further committees or instrumentalities as to him may seem suitable in the premises.

California is far from the center of population. Judging by the Census, it is not a big State. The problems that confront Governor Johnson are perhaps simpler, or at least expressed in simpler terms, than those that confront some of the older States, but in the history of the Legislature of 1911 and in the inaugural message and some of the other speeches of the Governor can be found, in my judgment, the clearest exposition of State needs and the treatment of those needs that is to be found in all our political literature.

There were developed in this country several forms of government-municipal, State, and National. The cities first took up the fight against privilege, and more and more are emerging into the light of responsive, responsible, centralized, and efficient government, with popular rather than constitutional checks.

Under the Roosevelt Administration the Federal Government grew more representative of the welfare of the average man, and there was a strong movement toward strengthening Federal authority at the expense of the States. But the Federal Gov

ernment is too overburdened with National problems to do justice to the detailed needs of the States. Just as in California the State wishes to furnish to the counties all possible powers of local self-government and insists that the counties shall be responsible and not neglected, so the people of the several States may not lean back on the Federal Government in asking for regulation of matters near at hand and of vital interest to the individual State, but must see to it that 'the State governments are conducted for the welfare of their present and future citizens.

With the elimination of the selection of the United States Senators from the State Legislatures there will pass the last vestige of excuse for National partisanship in the State's business. There will come a new alignment in the choice between progress and reaction, between conservation and exploitation, between the welfare of the many and the privilege of the few.

We of California, for the first time in many years, are proud of our humanly organized State. We hope that the country. will pardon a shifting of our boastfulness from the biggest trees and the biggest pumpkins to our claim that we have the best of the State governments.

A

NEW JERSEY farmer has made a careful estimate of the cost of raising potatoes. He has considered climate and fertilizer, cost of land and cost of labor, probabilities of marketing and dangers of waste on the way, and the toll to the industrious insect, and has concluded that every bushel of potatoes costs the Jersey farmer seventy-five cents. Potatoes are a valuable crop. An Iowa dairyman has figured that each cow costs twelve and a half cents a day above the cost of marketing her milk. Milk is a valuable crop. The cost of production has been standardized for practically every commodity. But nobody has worked out the cost of children, though they are the most valuable crop of all.

Children, like every other product, cost three kinds of things: brains, money, and muscle. The money cost is the only one of these three that is at all easy to estimate; obviously there is a minimum below which the most competent mother, let her sew and brew and bake ever so incessantly, cannot rear a child in health. But just what the very minimum, bargain-counter cost of children is no one seems to have determined, although from every side comes the cry that people do not have children because they cost so much.

Now, it will not do to put the subject aside with a Podsnappian wave of the arm, for when the irresistible tendency to increase the cost of living meets the immovable conviction that children are not only the greatest good to the individual but the most valuable gift to the State, something is bound to happen.

I drove up to Mahanoy City, a town in the anthracite fields, a few years ago. The coal-breakers stood like giant toboggan slides against the sky, and the culm piles were hand-made mountains beside the real hillswonderful places for the adventurous young. But very few children of the sliding-down-hill age were in sight, and I remarked their absence to the driver.

out of every five of 'em dies. But they don't lose much," he reassured me; "they mostly insure 'em for forty dollars. They say a child costs about eight dollars a year till it's five years old, and then it can sort o' scratch round for itself. When it's ten, it can go to work and help the family. So they insure 'em for forty dollars, and if they dies, they get their money back, and if they lives, they've got their kids. They don't stand to lose much either way," and he tapped his whip reflectively on the dashboard.

Eight dollars a year for five years!

Says Rowntree in his study of York, England:

Every [unskilled] laborer who has as many as three children must pass through a time-probably lasting about ten yearswhen he and his family will be underfed. .

If he has but two children, these conditions will be better to the extent of two shillings tenpence [a week]; if he has but one, they will be better to the extent of five shillings ha'penny."

According to this, it takes a minimum of two shillings tenpence a week to keep a child in York, or a little less than thirty-seven dollars a year. Of course these coal-miners' and unskilled laborers' children are distinctly cheap" children. They come from families way below the efficiency line, and the only value of their budgets is to indicate the lowest limit of subsistence for a child-the limit below which automatic elimination takes place. No one would seriously hold that it is for the advantage of society to rear children in such shallow economic soil. Taking so much for granted, what do children cost in homes that have the money basis at least for social efficiency?

In the matter of children it is not safe to begin at the beginning, for doctors' bills on the one hand and generous friends on the other make the first cost of babies excessively difficult to determine.

"Our little daughter cost us twenty dollars the first year-ten for the doctor, ten for clothes and I wish you could see what a

"It cost precisely six hundred and sixtyseven dollars to provide my baby's outfit— to get him here, to furnish him with crib, gocart, high chair, and clothes, and to feed and care for him after he came." This from the wife of a New England business man.

Between these two range other first-year middle-class budgets, with the doctor's bill and the nurse's salary well in the foreground. The possibility of the first year's cost stretching suddenly into the hundreds is a grave thing to face. Suppose you were living on twelve hundred a year, how many hundreds could you save in the year before the child comes? The same erratic doctors' bills introduce a wide margin of variation into the dangerous second summer. For these reasons it is convenient to begin the study of the cost of children at the period between three and five, when the irregular expenses of babyhood are over, and those of compulsory schooling have not commenced. The tendency even of the rich is to dress children of this age simply, and the cost of food is kept pretty well within limits by the rigid requirements of health. It is the period when the cost of the child is affected more by the internal efficiency of the home and the capabilities of the parents, and less by outside influences, than at any other. What, then, is the yearly cost of children between three and five ?

Mrs. Ardell, of Wisconsin, is a capable woman and a good manager. She stretches her husband's twelve hundred a year over about as many things as twelve hundred dollars can be made to cover. She seems to get a lot of joy out of life, and doesn't pay heavily for it in doctor's bills. She lives in a town with a soon-to-be-realized ambition to be a city, and has a tiny house and a large yard, where the four-year-old Ardell can disport himself in unwatched safety. Naturally she keeps no nursemaid nor other servantone can't on twelve hundred.

Sixty-six dollars and twenty cents a year Master Ardell costs his parents in money; $43.80 for food, $10 for clothes, $10 for doctor's bills, $3.40 for incidentals. According to his mother's schedule, he gets no store-bought toys; he does not go to kindergarten; instead, he spends most of his waking hours out of doors while his mother keeps her attention tied to his little romperstrings, during the six days at least while

her husband is in his office. She can rest from the cook-stove and broom by taking care of the baby. Professor Simon Patten seems to have had her in mind when he said:

Whatever narrows the environment of individuals, or limits their activities, stops their growth and stops social progress."

It is perhaps fortunate for the community that Mrs. Ardell was fairly well educated and well read before the limiting influence of her small son fell upon her.

One wonders just how inevitable it is that the world should close in for the parents as it opens out for the child. Take the Wards, who live in a Pennsylvania town of about the same size as the Ardells', and who have the same income-twelve hundred a year. They, too, have a four-year-old son, but he costs them $95.17 a year-$28.97 more than the Ardells pay for theirs. The following is his list of expenses: Clothes:

No doctor's bill stood against Mrs. Ward's son in 1911.

The extra money spent on this youngster is to provide for his education and to make it possible for his parents to promote their present efficiency. The Wards have set their faces against stagnation. Mr. Ward writes me of concerts and lectures they attend, of university extension schemes and co-operative buying experiments in which they are interested, and Mrs. Ward " keeps up her music." For these advantages they sacrifice something from their clothes and something from their savings, on the principle, as Mr. Ward states it, that "to save as an end in itself is vicious; the father and mother must be free to enter into the Larger Life."

From the standpoint of society as well as that of the children themselves, it seems important that they should take as little as possible from the present efficiency of their

parents. Unless they more than make up to society for what they suppress in their parents, are they not a losing proposition? And is it right to place this heavy responsibility upon them?

Neither the Ardells nor the Wards celebrated the advent of their children by keying up their standard of living; they continued in the houses they occupied before the children were born, and generally went their old ways. When even a slightly improved standard is adopted, the cost of children goes up with a jump. Take the case of Mr. Merton, a New England salaried man, with an income of $1,800. He has two children, one ten, the other four years old, and with their coming he raised the entire level of his housekeeping.

"In addition to their direct expenditures," he writes, "about one hundred dollars should be reckoned as additional cost of rent, for if we had not had children we should have lived in a smaller house or else have rented enough rooms in our present one to bring the annual cost down correspondingly. For the same reason the children should be accounted as adding to the annual cost of fuel-perhaps $40. I think $20 would be below, rather than above, the amount chargeable to their account annually for added expense of washing and cleaning, replacement of bedding and table linen, and wear and tear of furniture."

Of this one hundred dollars, $54 is somewhat arbitrarily charged to the account of the four-year-old daughter, making her personal cost as follows:

The cost of children not only goes up with a jump with each modification of the standard of living, but the jump gains momentum at each level. A larger house means a fuller life for the mother, and a fuller life for the mother generally means the need of a nursemaid. Or, again, if a kindergarten is not available, or the parents prefer to have the child begin its education at home, the dancingteacher is likely to be added to the. nursemaid, and sometimes the trained kindergartner will supersede the unskilled attendant.

This progression appears in the following group of budgets:

I-PENNSYLVANIA FAMILY. ANNUAL INCOME $3,500. GIRL FOUR YEARS OLD

$4,500. BOY FOUR YEARS OLD

II-MAINE FAMILY. ANNUAL INCOME

Food Clothes

Books, toys, etc. Nursemaid.. Dancing lessons.

YORK FAMILY. ANNUAL INCOME $6,000. BOY FOUR YEARS OLD

III-NEW

Shoes (made to order).

Doctor.

Insurance (for college education and
start in life, etc.).
Carfare to parks.
Barber.....
Incidentals..
Dancing school..
Trained kindergartner.

This last budget (III) is about the upper limit of cost for a perfectly well child in the middle class. Stripped of those items which are either unusual or in excess of what is generally regarded as necessary-trained kindergartner, dancing school, large sum for insurance, made-to-order shoes, certified milk-even this comes within two hundred dollars.

From the consideration of these budgets, and many more in my possession, it seems safe to estimate the necessary cost of a child between the ages of three and five at about one hundred dollars a year when the mother is both housekeeper and nursemaid or teacher. This amount will be more than doubled where a nursemaid or teacher is employed.

A New England friend protests against the publication of such estimates as these, on the ground that "they will discourage young people from having children." She voices what I find to be a very general superstition, that it is wise to draw a pleasant veil over the cost till the offspring have actually arrived, because then the parents 66 will have

rance.

to manage somehow -as though each child arrived holding a certified check for its maintenance in one hand and directions for its care in the other! It is a way of teaching the dangerous doctrine of the value of ignoAre people any less ready to make sacrifices because they know just how great they will be? Would it conduce to the happiness of a child to know itself an inadvertent obstacle between its parents and their unrealized ambitions? Rather than ignore the facts, might it not be well to consider why, since a child is the most valuable gift a person can make to the community, the tax upon parents is so high as compared with their resources? What, for example, is the trouble back of such plaints as these I have received?

My life has been dwarfed in raising my family."

"Our children have their higher efficiency curtailed in order that they may keep alive."

"Father and his ambition had to be sidetracked to educate us children, so our home must be classed as a non-paying one.'

"No teacher in this part of the country can care for his children and have any money to spend in keeping himself mentally efficient."

66

My wife is a wonderful manager, but no a...ount of management will make the salary my congregation pay me large enough to bring up two children on." 99

"My children say to me,' Why, papa, can we not go on with our education?' And the only answer an indulgent father can make is to say frankly, 'Children, the family grew faster than papa's income, and now I must ask you to help throug...'

All these good people seem to be surprised and hurt. Are not children like flowers, growing of God's good grace? Well, if we had the statistics in black and white, it is probable that we should find some cash outlay necessary to raise dandelions; and it wouldn't make them any less welcome in the springtime, either!

Now, such plaints do not appear to be based on the "fixed costs of children, although an analysis of many budgets shows that these increase from $100 for a child between three and five, to $128 when the child is seven years old, $180 when it is between ten and twelve, and $212 when it is between fourteen and sixteen. They are based on the uncertain costs of middle-class standards, on the demand for health, and education, and a start in life.

It is strange that American middle-class homes will allow themselves to be crippled financially by the need of sending their chil

dren to private schools and to save money for their college courses. Is not the right to free education accepted by us all? I have letters from one family with an income of only $2,400 a year, showing how it is trying in vain to stagger along under the burden of a son in college and two daughters in a private school. This family is by no means exceptional; and yet few parents even dream of whispering into the public ear that it is the business of the State to provide free such education as their children ought to have-an incontrovertible example of home incompetence. For often it is the very parents who give their children a paid-for education who feel that they must put by money to support them as young men and women while they are finding out what work they are fitted to do.

It is not, perhaps, so strange that they take no means to free themselves from the increasing menace of the doctor's bill. Among more than a hundred letters only one makes any suggestion to diminish the increasing cost of health. This is from a New York physician, who believes that we should have free health as we have, theoretically, free education.

"The community should demand that the best talent be in charge of free hospitals and clinics," he writes, "that they should devote all their time to their respective fields of service, and be so remunerated as to make public health service not only an object of wageearning, but also an incentive for greater professional skill.”

These three-health, education, and a start in life are the great unknown quantities in the money cost of children that imperil the middle-class standards of living. But what of those other costs-costs of brain and muscle-that also imperil the middle-class ideals?

A college professor has got this muscle cost down to a time measure.

"The amount of my wife's time," he says, "taken daily because of the children—including the time spent in dressmaking for them, washing, ironing, etc.-averages between three and four hours. Probably an hour of my time is taken, in addition. The necessity of being at home to attend to the children obliges my wife to forego many pleasant social activities, and to curtail greatly the time she might otherwise devote to benevolent or public objects." He, however, has a yard in which his children can safely play without supervision.