The film whose cast appears in IMDb and which is available on youtube under the title Do Children Count? is in fact this film. Do Childen Count? was not a film as such but a general title of a series of twelve films starring cutesy "six-year old" Mary McAllister (who was in fact eight). The series was written by Charles Mortimer Peck who also wrote another series for Essanay called "Is Marriage Sacred?" (to which question I imagine the answer "no" was not an option). Essanay hugely hyped McAllister ("the First Baby Star of the Films" which she was not) and the series is general, which supposedly broke attendance-records and even changed the attitude of distributors towards the potential of two-reel films (25 minutes).
The series was produced in collaboration with Kleine and Edison (K-E-S-E films) and were in line with the sort of social concern/public service films that Edison's company had been producing during the teens (one or two of them rather good and one of them,The Land Beyond the Sunset 1912, excellent). Essanay itself has been trying to broaden its range by including serious socially-concerned dramas such as Theodore Wharton's From the Submerged (1912). So this series concentrated, in rather saccharine fashion, on the various social predicaments facing children - poverty, six parents, orphanages, divorce and so on.
But this was 1917 and, somehow or other, the project got hijacked by the war-effort, presumably initially one the grounds that good old US sentimentality was somehow "what one was fighting for". According to Moving Picture World the films "are being offered as one of the many big reasons why men should answer their country's call, and they are proving most effective as recruiting propaganda." By the end of the year, McAllister was being billed as "a government recruiting sergeant" and this film, the twelfth and last of the series and in a sense therefore its culmination, is a particularly grotesque example of war-propaganda with the usual innuendo against pacifists ("slackers" as they were called at the time) and containing a scene that has to be seen to be believed where the anti-pacifist encourages a group of young children to march up and down, bearing flags, chanting "War! War! We want war!".
