ch, as everyone
knows or should know, is the dominating factor in the survival or death
of infancy. Now it may be briefly asserted that civilized woman, and
more especially industrial woman, threatens to cease to be a mammal. If
this assertion can be substantiated, and if the "economic independence
of women" necessarily involves it, no biologist, no medical man, no
first-hand student of life, will hesitate to condemn finally the ideal
toward which Mrs. Gilman and those who think with her would have us go.
Things may be bad, things _are_ very bad: the lot of woman must be
raised immensely, because the race must be raised, and cannot be raised
otherwise; but progress is going forward and not backward, Mr.
Chesterton notwithstanding. Woman will not become more than a mammal by
becoming less, and going back on that great achievement of ascending
life. Individuals may do so, and are doing so, lamentably misdirected as
many of them now are; but that is the end of them and their kind. It is
quite easy to stamp out motherhood and its inevitable economic
dependence, but with it you stamp out the future.

It is generally admitted that our women nurse their babies less than
they used to do. It is as generally admitted that this is often
deliberate choice, and we all know that it is often economic necessity:
the human mother "mingles in the natural industries of a human
creature," such as the factory affords, and cannot simultaneously stay
at home to nurse her baby, making men--for which, as a "natural
industry" of women, even as against making, say, lead-glaze for china,
there may be something to be said.

But whilst popular preachers and castigators of the sins of society
fulminate against the fine lady who asks for belladonna and refuses to
do her duty, we must enquire to what extent, if any, women no longer
nurse their babies because they cannot, try they never so patiently and
strenuously. It is the general belief amongst those whose daily work
qualifies them for an opinion, that women are tending to lose the power
of nursing. Professor von Bunge, whose name is honoured by all students
of the action of drugs, has satisfied himself that alcoholism in the
father is a great cause of incapacity to nurse in daughters. However
that interpretation may be, the fact seems clear; and the change in this
direction is evidently much more rapid than might be accounted for by
the improvement in artificial feeding of infants leading to the s