the midwife, and the necessary fee for medical aid when required. During the puerperium and until the baby is one year old the mother is required to attend an infant or maternity clinic and follow the advice given, for which she pays another 20s. Provided she fulfils the terms required by the State, she should retain the balance of the 57. (normally 31.). This scheme possesses certain advantages, but it is open to obvious criticism. However the details be settled, a wide-spread demand is now being made for financial assistance to meet expenditure incurred at child-birth or for relief from wage-earning immediately before and after. The recent Trade Union Congress resolved to

'support the principle underlying the scheme for mothers' pensions now in operation in thirty of the States of North America, which recognises the valued services rendered to the community by mothers who tend and cherish their children in the home; it urges that a scheme on similar lines be established in this country, so that no mother who worthily discharges this great service should be brought under the operation of the Poor Law, or prevented by economic stress from discharging it adequately and well.'

Conclusion.

We have now stated in its simplest form the problem, social and medical, of maternity. We have similarly presented, in brevity, the main lines of its solution. The issue is the encouragement rather than discouragement of child-birth, which at present entails a vast amount of avoidable social misery and preventible suffering coupled with a gratuitous and excessive loss of life. The solution is to be found in healthy and well-informed mothers, whose maternal function-pre-natal, natal and post-natal-shall be protected, and whose lives shall be safeguarded. These great ends may be secured for millions of mothers, to the inestimable advantage of the nation, by providing for the health and education of the growing girl, and the proper attention to the mother at child-birth by means of improved facilities in regard to midwifery, medical attendance and maternity benefit.

There are, however, two lions in the path. The first is the lion of lethargy-uninformed public opinion and lack of what Lord Salisbury used to call 'public impulse.' The second is the many-headed lion of competing authorities and chaotic administration. The enlightenment of the public mind is steadily going forward. The admirable services of voluntary agencies supported by such men as Mr Broadbent of Huddersfield and Mr Arthur Acland, assisted by a splendid regiment of women, the public press, the advocacy of Mr Samuel, Mr Long and Lord Rhondda at the Local Government Board, and Mr Pease (now Lord Gainford) and Mr Fisher at the Board of Education, the permeating influence of the National Insurance Scheme which has made its way into millions of homes, the national baby week' movement, and above all the emphasis given to these matters by the devastation of the war-all these influences enlighten the public and create an impulse and in the highest form an inspiration.

The need for unification or, at least, coordination of the various central and local authorities is even more pressing. In the previous pages we have been introduced to the confusion and overlapping which exist. A child is usually born apparently under the ægis of His Majesty's Privy Council and the National Insurance Commission; its infancy comes under the Local Government Board; its days of babyhood are neglected by the State as nonexistent; its school days fall beneath the wing of the President of the Board of Education; at puberty it is again forgotten by a State which never professed a knowledge of physiology; the health, housing, food supply, and employment of the adolescent come within the jurisdiction of the Insurance Commission, the Local Government Board, the Board of Education, the Board of Agriculture, and the Home Office; and in adult life the whole gamut of central departments may have a finger in the pie. Nor is the chaos less remarkable if we restrict ourselves to maternity only. There, too, the Privy Council, the Board of Education, the Local Government Board, the Home Office, and the Insurance Commission have their say; and, all through and all the time, public-spirited men and women, as individuals or in voluntary societies, fill up the amazing gaps in babyhood

and puberty, and render invaluable service to the childbearing mother.

The fact is, there is no escape from the existing chaos but the establishment of a Ministry of Health, coordinating not only Maternity Service but all health work, and providing guidance and inspiration for local authorities. For the overlapping is not confined to White-' hall; it occurs likewise in every local area in the country from John o' Groats to Land's End. Maternity and infant welfare are the business of the local sanitary authority, the local education authority, the local insurance committee, the local poor law union, and a series of local bodies and associations for midwifery, health visitation, and so forth. This anomalous, complex and duplicated system, or lack of system, leads to untold waste, confusion and inefficiency. If, as Sir Edwin Chadwick said, 'a people's health, as a source of a people's strength, is a proper subject of regard by a constitutional government,' it seems high time that these undesirable and ineffective conditions should end. Nor can it be wisely postponed until after the war. For the war itself has not only accentuated the pre-war complications, but has added to them. Now we have to think of new questions, of housing and food supply, of the prevention of epidemics following on demobilisation, of tuberculosis and syphilis in the army, of disabled soldiers, and of the coming shortage of doctors-problems affecting not only these Islands, but those great Dependencies and Dominions of Britain over the sea, which look to her for guidance, cooperation and inspiration. And always and everywhere the burden of neglected maternity lies in the background, with its costly and daily sacrifice of women and its yearly toll of dead children. We trust that the convincing appeal of Mr Waldorf Astor, in 'The Health of the People: A New National Policy,' and the insistent speeches of Lord Rhondda in behalf of unification of the public services of health and maternity will reach the ear of the Prime Minister, on whom, in this respect as in others, 'the ends of the earth have come.'

Art. 12.-THE BAGDAD RAILWAY NEGOTIATIONS. In an article in the 'Quarterly Review' of January 1917 the two main trends of thought running through German war literature on the Near and Middle East are clearly set forth; 'the first is occupied with the subject of a Central European agglomerate stretching from the Baltic and the North Sea to Constantinople, and thence dominating Asia to the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf; the second dwells on the use of this agglomerate as a wedge to split the British Empire.' In the numerous extracts quoted from recent German publications it is shown how commercial penetration in Turkey, where German trade increased tenfold between 1889 and 1912, is in future to be solicitously fostered as a means to political ascendency; how the road from Berlin to the Persian Gulf is considered the vital nerve in German economic life and German policy; how the phrase 'Ostend-Bagdad' implies the undermining of Britain's command of the seas by means of a land route; how the way is to be opened to Egypt and Persia, and through the Persian Gulf-where England's supremacy and the Pax Britannica must be broken -to the Indian Ocean and the lands around it.

An old saying points the unwisdom of spreading the net in sight of the bird; if these professions of policy should appear in the German interest premature, they have certainly served to emphasise the paramount British interest of opposing to the uttermost the Drang nach Osten. It is indeed well put that, should the Prussian system secure its hold across the great land mass of the globe, from Denmark to Arabia, there would soon be no vital issue, whether in Europe, Asia, or Africa, that would not be decided from Berlin. After all that has been said and written in Germany on war aims-Turkey to be the pivotal point of Prussian world-power and future dominion; Antwerp to be surrendered as the gateway of German expansion; a reconstituted Poland under German authority; the Chancellor's own avowal, on the eve of war, of the intended annexation of the French colonies-clearly the possibility of satisfying the ambitions of Imperial Germany can no longer enter into our calculations. No reasonable give-and-take settlement can be lasting or expedient with a great Military Power

if it be set upon using every point of vantage gained as a means of threatening or undermining its neighbours.

We are not concerned in the present article with such larger aspects of foreign policy; nor are we inclined to discuss here whether in the years before the war it would have been wiser, or indeed possible, to abstain from further efforts to reach a general settlement with Germany by friendly negotiation. Our immediate object is a narrower one; it is confined to tracing the development of railway interests in Turkey and, in the light of that development and of available information, seeking to restore the perspective and focus the situation in which the later negotiations concerning the Bagdad Railway and cognate questions took place, and ultimately resulted in a draft agreement.

Historically the development of railway enterprise in the Ottoman Empire may be dealt with in three periods, the first terminating in 1888; the second in 1903; and the last in June 1914.

In European Turkey, railway enterprise was at first promoted, though by no means on the most approved conditions, by the late Baron Hirsch, who obtained a concession from the Sultan in 1867, and constituted the Oriental Railway Company. The principal sections of this Company's system were those establishing communication between Constantinople and the Bulgarian frontier and between Salonica and Mitrovitza. For some years the Company was under French influence; but the participation of Austrian capital and the close relations of Baron Hirsch with the Vienna Cabinet subsequently gave the undertaking an increasingly Austrian character until, at a much later period, the Deutsche Bank, acting through a Swiss institution, acquired the greater portion of Baron Hirsch's holdings in the concern.

In Asiatic Turkey, such railway enterprises as existed were at the outset entirely in British hands. The SmyrnaAidin, the Smyrna-Cassaba, and the Mersina-Adana lines were all built by British capital and with British material, and remained at first under British management, while the line from Haidar Pasha to Ismidt, after an attempt at direct administration by the Ottoman Government had broken down, was leased for some years to a syndicate