te, irreparable wrong is done to
helpless children," adding that the appalling infant mortality of the
manufacturing districts attracted far less attention and interest in the
public mind than the death of a single murderer. At nearly the same time
Mr. F.W. Lowndes gave the fruit of long research in a paper read before
the British Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled "The
Destruction of Infancy;"[26] and this was supplemented by testimony
from experts, the Statistical Society adding weighty testimony to the
same effect.[27]

From these and other official testimony it was found that in nineteen
manufacturing towns,[28] out of 1,023,896 children [Forty-first Report
of the Registrar-General, p. 36] born, 82,259 died in infancy. The rate
of mortality varied from 59.4 in Portsmouth through an ascending scale,
being in London 78.6 and in Liverpool the almost incredible proportion
of 103.6 per thousand. In a rural country infant mortality does not
exceed from thirty-five to forty per thousand. The Report of the Select
Committee on the Protection of Infant Life was filled with details so
horrible that only the sworn testimony of experts made them credited at
all.[29]

Dr. Hunter's report on rural mortality shows that when mothers are
employed in what are known as "field gangs" for out-of-door work,
leaving their children in the charge of old women too weak for such
labor as their own, that infants died like sheep. Godfrey's Cordial was
the chief engine of destruction; the corps of inspectors who reported to
the Government finding infants in all stages of prostration, from the
overdoses of the popular specific warranted to render any attention from
nurse or mother quite unnecessary.

As to the direct effects of factory or out-door labor on pregnant
mothers, out of 10,000 births among factory mothers, there died from
1863-75 of children under one year of age, in Portsmouth 1,459,
Liverpool 2,189, London 1,591, and other towns with textile industries
1,940. Statistics taken in Germany and at other points all went to show
that in the matter of out-door labor at the harvest season, when all
women-workers are in the fields, the deaths of nursing infants were
three times as great as in the other nine months.

For details and deduction from these facts the reader is referred to the
reports themselves. "I go so far," wrote Mr. Jevons, "as to advocate the
ultimate complete exclusion of mothers of children under the ag