sideration. We are treating of the sacred things of
life--of life itself. If parents combine to crucify and betray their
daughters--to sell them body and soul into bondage for social or other
advantages; if they preserve silence when they should speak and thereby
take all the sunshine, for all eternity, out of one existence; then, if on
their death-beds these daughters should accuse them, the guilty knowledge
that they were responsible will be the sting that will blast their hope of
peace and forgiveness here and in the worlds to come.

When mothers realize that, every day, in every large hospital in every city
in the civilized world some woman (a daughter of some mother) is being [52]
unsexed because of these unjustly obtained diseases, surely their voices
shall speak in no uncertain way.

Another eugenic suggestion that should deeply concern every good mother is,
that the mother's milk is the private property of the babe, and whoever
deprives the babe of this, the sole right it possesses, is not only a thief
but a scoundrel. A curious and significant fact was discovered by
investigators when studying the question of infant mortality a few years
ago. It was found from a mass of statistics that there were two recent
instances when the death rate of infants decreased suddenly and quite
decidedly. The first instance was when the Civil War in this country caused
a cotton famine in England. As a result of the famine the factories of
Lancashire were all closed and the employees being then without work
remained at home. As a large percentage of the workers were married women
with children they had the time and the opportunity to nurse their children
regularly. Despite the fact that these women were starved and badly clad
and deprived of the comforts of home, the death rate of the infants dropped
steadily to an unprecedently low mark.

A number of years later, when the German army surrounded Paris during the
Franco-Prussian War the besieged inhabitants of the capital suffered from
hunger and disease. The death rate of the adult population increased
enormously while the death rate of the infants dropped markedly.

The explanation of this curious phenomenon was simply that while times were
normal the women labored outside of their homes and as a consequence the
babies were not fed regularly and when fed were not fed mothers' milk. It
demonstrated a truth that we are apt to lose sight of, that mothers' milk,
even the milk from