expenditure. Accordingly, they saw to it that the local authorities did their duty.
By enforcing the housing regulations in these two instances the Home Service workers helped to make it more certain that in the future the law would be observed. Thus the interest of the Red Cross in the welfare of the families of the men in the service leads it from the home to the town, so that ieraately its work affects the welfare of everybody.
When an evil condition is found to exist in a city or a state, the first thing that people think of is the passage of a bill by the Legislature. Thereupon, everybody is satisfied and the public is likely to imagine that what was wrong will thereafter be right. Unless, however, someone makes it his or her business to see that the law is enforced, the city or the state is no better off than it was before.
Here, then, is an additional service which fi Red Cross is performing. In the course of its work with families it comes into touch with every phase of city government and also with the many institutions and organizations which, with the support of private funds, are engaged in public work. Each time that the Home Service worker takes a child from a factory or a workshop and sees that he returns to school, she helps to make the laws prohibiting child labor effective—and, as was indicated in Chapter III, this returning of children to school is constantly being done by the Red Cross. The need for such action exists particularly, according to the National Child Labor Committee, in several states where there has been a relaxing of the enforcement of the Child Labor Laws.
