for pre-school children was held with two doctors and a nurse in charge. These are types of the annual May Day festival.

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It is easy to say that May Day has no results and hard to prove that it has. We know when a Maternity Center Association in a restricted area in New York has cut maternal deaths in half by adequate pre-natal care and has reduced still-births and infant deaths to two thirds; but we cannot say how much of that result may have been due to an aroused public interest, nor what part a celebration of May Day may have had in arousing it. We know when the mortality between the ages of five and nine declines from 5.1 to 2.1 in five years; but we can not say how much of this may be due to health work stimulated by May Day. But we do know that one twentieth of all deaths come in the period between birth and school age, that five per cent of all those deaths result from diphtheria and that diphtheria is preventable. If, then, a May Day celebration centers attention on these facts and stimulates a community to undertake immunization, surely it is entitled to some of the credit for the decline of the death-rate. One State reported 16,000 immunized against diphtheria as a result of May Day. The District of Columbia announced the inauguration of a diphtheria immunization campaign so active that it shall be carried forward until diphtheria is stamped out of the District.

But for the most part it is impossible to report or even to know the real results of health work. A case to illustrate this occurred in my own

family. When my son was about thirteen years old he brought home to me a health examination card which had a check opposite "Hearing." He had been thoroughly examined by our family physician. He had never been ill without medical attention. Naturally, then, I was surprised. But I hurried him to an ear specialist. Testing him, he discovered my son's hearing in one ear was impaired, made further examination and found a stopped Eustachian tube. Asked if the child had had an attack of the "flu," I answered, "Yes." This was the result. Fortunately the deafness soon yielded to treatment. But except for that school examination, it would probably have gone on until too late to cure, before we were aware of it. Yet the saving of his hearing was never reported as a result of health work. Doubtless this is but one of thousands upon thousands of similar

cases.

It is easy enough to have no opinion of public service or public work until one benefits directly from it. Then suddenly one feels the personal gratitude. This came home to me with startling effect when my child was bitten by a dog affected with rabies. Up to that time Pasteur had been to me but a name. From that time on he was my personal benefactor and my debt to him an intimate one. Yet he had done a great thing in making his treatment available and would have been as great had I never thought of him. Thus it is, I think, with public undertakings such as May Day. They seem to mean little until one can trace some direct result from them. But their work is valuable and significant even

though the effect of it is not reported. For it makes help available and ready for those who do need it.

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When it comes to raising standards it is easier to compute results; for the very fact that standards are set, especially as regards children, means in this ambitious and competitive country the stimulation of an effort to reach up toward them.

To say that May Day material has appeared in magazines totaling 16,000,000 readers and in newspapers reaching billions; that governors and mayors have issued proclamations calling attention to it; that sermons have been preached about it in thousands of churches; that clinics have been held in a thousand cities-is to report only the effectiveness of the association's organization and the response they got to their appeal for effort. It in no way registers the results or effectiveness of May Day. And yet such, perforce, is the only kind of report that such an organization can make. It does not know and can not say what may be the result of this effort to rouse public opinion and stimulate action.

One may report occasionally a direct result like the examination of the fourteen hundred children of preschool age in a Summer Round-Up in Massachusetts or the examination of the seven thousand in California. Sometimes a report may be very specific, as specific as this from my own State: "Five hundred previously unreported births turned into the Bureau of Vital Statistics after the country birth registration surveys; 4136 children immunized against diphtheria during the year; 5773 smallpox vaccinations reported;

4980 children awarded 'Six Point' buttons; 5500 badges awarded children meeting all three requirements-birth, immunization and 'Six Point' standards."

But such reports are but indications. There can be no balance-sheet in building up public opinion, in raising standards.

The criticism that is sometimes made as to the value of this kind of work comes from those who have failed to apprehend its nature. It is not the job of May Day to accomplish a set program of work, but only to inspire and lead to one. The idea of May Day was inaugurated by the Child Health Association, a specialized agency working with the avowed object and to the specific purpose of making it possible for every child to be well born, and perfectly healthy in mind and body. In the accomplishment of its purpose it works through and with the regularly constituted health groups in the States, in some instances Boards of Health, in others Child Hygiene Bureaus, in still others Public Health Nursing Divisions; and it coöperates with other organizations interested in health such as the American Red Cross, the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor, the National Federation of Day Nurseries, the National Organization for Public Health Nursing, the National Safety Council, the National Tuberculosis Association.

Its goal is an "all the year round" program in every community, directed to the improvement of the youth of that community—a program consisting of surveys, clinics, school examinations, immunization, and designed by specialists to ascer

tain the condition of the health of the community's children and to bring it up to normal standards, and conducted by specialists with the assistance of volunteer help where untrained service will do.

It so happens that a director of Publications and Promotions of the Child Health Association is the brilliant Chairman of the "Department of Public Welfare" of the largest of the women's organizations, the General Federation of Women's Clubs. In this position she brought the attention of this Child Health program to the members of the Federation, asked them to get back of it and help her with it. If it is to be called a "project" of the Federation it must be understood that it is a "project" of their will and interest and not necessarily of their hands. There are clubwomen who want to do surveys, establish clinics, raise money for them, solicit doctors to staff them, and bring children to them, who want to clean school-houses and to work for bond issues to build new ones. Through the clubs they hear of this work and offer their services to these other agencies. Sometimes clubs are led by or composed of such women. Then the club itself assumes responsibility for this work. But whether these women do this work through other agencies or through their clubs, they have been recruited for it through this Public Welfare Department of the Federation. the Federation. Surely one can hardly call this part of the clubs' work superficial. As well might one say that the work of the promotor who finds the capital for a railroad is only superficial.

And in line with this policy this director secured the assistance of the

Federation in "putting over" the May Day celebration. Here to hand was a medium through which the idea and the goal could be brought to the attention of millions of women who could probably not be reached otherwise. For we must remember, in thinking of clubs, that they are especially adaptable as mediums for publicity. Here was an organization especially adapted to organize celebrations. The State and local organizations responded. In some cases they had only to get behind other agencies; in others they had to initiate the celebration; in still others to assume full responsibility for it. But whether they served as promoter, backer or assister they surely contributed to the result something that can not quite be called superficial.

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Not all of the great women's organizations are highly specialized agencies seeking to do specific tasks. Some of them are great recruiting agencies of interest. Specialized agencies bring to them reports of work done, outlines of work to be attempted and ask them to back them up with their approval. What this means actually is the bringing of their work to the attention, and the winning for it of the kindly interest, of millions of women who otherwise would not have heard of it; mobilizing the interest of those women in it; and perhaps finding for these specialized organizations new workers and supporters.

Those who think of the General Federation of Women's Clubs as an association to do a job or a scientific foundation to get results or a congress to govern a country, may grow impatient with what it seems to ac

complish, or an apparent lack of performance. But those who know it for what it is, a great reservoir of interest to be tapped, can not. This national organization of clubs was not organized to attempt a project. Women got together because there was pleasure in discussion and exchange of ideas. Getting together they found themselves a force. Realizing this force they have applied it here and there as projects interested them. The wonder is not that they have not accomplished more, but that this force has been so utilized for good.

To say that the May Day celebration itself was not worthy of the effort is to make a similar mistake as to its function and purpose. Though it may come but once a year its significance and effect are not bounded by sunset. Just as a seed planted in one five minutes' work may start a tree to live a thousand years, or a kind deed done in an hour may save a life for many years, or a single

speech may start a campaign that may revolutionize the thought of a country and the history of the world, so is it intended that the celebration of May Day may contribute to that new age in which governments and peoples shall realize that the first duty of the state is to see that children born into it shall be born well and continue well.

We seem to be living in a transition. day. Science has dealt hardly with our old beliefs and thus, our old ideals, or, to be more accurate, our purposes. Psychology is telling us strange things as to the way we are made and what causes us to act as we do. But they are also telling us new ways to go, new ways to control old enemies, new ways to attain our ends, so that it is hardly too much to hope that a future day may be able to produce a perfected childhood. When that day comes men may look back on this idea of May Day as a finger, a sign pointing the way.

T

HE chief dilemma of modern spiritual life in the Occident has been the deadlock between religion and science. Theology and evolution, church and laboratory, faith and fact, have been declared irreconcilable, and any meeting or rapprochement between them impossible. It is, then, highly exciting and a tremendous moment for the modern in search of truth, when he discovers that four thousand years ago in the forest hermitages of her ancient seers, India achieved the impossible.

When our proud Western civilization was yet undreamed of, in those forest retreats of the early Indian philosophers, logic and God, accurate science and profound spirituality, did meet, were reconciled-nay more, permanently welded together-and have thus remained in that country, through the ages. By a curious irony, to be brought to-day from the pure peaks of the Himalayas to the top-heavy magnificence of the skyscraper-sheltering its spiritual starvation. A scientific religion! India might pardonably ask Miss Katherine Mayo if this is not as important as a scientific system of sanitation?

"Hinduism": what a strange medley of grotesque images that word evokes in most Occidental minds.

With Indians there is, of course, no such term. Nor is there, oddly enough, throughout the Sanskrit language of this intensely religious people, any word signifying "religion." There is, instead, the word dharma-that which is to be held fast or kept: the law of life, "the eternal and immutable principles which hold together the universe in its parts and in its whole." And within that general law there is a religion, a natural path and belief, for every type of man and every grade of intelligence from the lowest fetishism of the illiterate Pariah, to the highest absolutism of the yogi who has literally "realized God."

"All religions," said one of the greatest of Hindus, Swami Vivekananda, "are so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite-each determined by the conditions of its birth and association and each of them marking a stage of progress." It has been this inclusive viewpoint, this broad and comprehensive spirit, that has made of India "a perfect university of religious culture," including every shade of spiritual thought and conception.

The Hindus worship God in three aspects: first, the Absolute God, the impersonal and changeless Principle,