American Notes of the Week
My Cable) Crum WELFARE WORK.
President Hoover has invited between three and four hundred experts to co-operate in the White House Conference on Child Welfare Work. The President has taken a close personal concern in the subject since his experiences in Belgium during the War, when he noted that children "did not play when they were improperly fed." The United States has an immense number of welfare organizations, but their activities are imperfectly co-ordinated and unequal to the present needs. The President conceived the idea of calling together representatives of voluntary and govern- mental organizations, as well as individual workers, with the purpose of trying to work out plans for effective co- operation in an adequate national programme. For the first time social service workers, dentists, physicians, nurses, educators, economists and other experts who have been working independently and often with incompatible results upon related problems, are to pool their experience and seek common ground as a base for future action. An anonymous benefactor recently sent the President a cheque for $500,000 to meet the expenses of the Conference and of such preliminary work as it may see fit to set afoot. The President's accept- ance of the cheque has been criticized as a violation of the rule forbidding the acceptance of gifts by Presidents during their term of office, but the purposes for which the money is to be used are generally accepted as a sufficient answer to criticism.
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