dignity, and the vitality of mothers is speedily crushed, so
that often they cannot so much as suckle their infants; ignorant
girl-mothers give their infants potatoes and gin; on every hand we are
told of the evidence of degeneracy in the race, or if not in the race, at
all events, in the young individuals of to-day.

It would be out of place, and would lead us too far, to discuss
here these various practical outcomes of the foolish attempt to
belittle the immense racial importance of motherhood. It is
enough here to touch on the one point of the excess of infantile
mortality.

In England--which is not from the social point of view in a very
much worse condition than most countries, for in Austria and
Russia the infant mortality is higher still, though in Australia
and New Zealand much lower, but still excessive--more than
one-fourth of the total number of deaths every year is of infants
under one year of age. In the opinion of medical officers of
health who are in the best position to form an opinion, about
one-half of this mortality, roughly speaking, is absolutely
preventable. Moreover, it is doubtful whether there is any real
movement of decrease in this mortality; during the past half
century it has sometimes slightly risen and sometimes slightly
fallen, and though during the past few years the general movement
of mortality for children under five in England and Wales has
shown a tendency to decrease, in London (according to J.F.J.
Sykes, although Sir Shirley Murphy has attempted to minimize the
significance of these figures) the infantile mortality rate for
the first three months of life actually rose from 69 per 1,000 in
the period 1888-1892 to 75 per 1,000 in the period 1898-1901.
(This refers, it must be remembered, to the period before the
introduction of the Notification of Births Act.) In any case,
although the general mortality shows a marked tendency to
improvement there is certainly no adequately corresponding
improvement in the infantile mortality. This is scarcely
surprising, when we realize that there has been no change for the
better, but rather for the worse, in the conditions under which
our infants are born and reared. Thus William Hall, who has had
an intimate knowledge extending over fifty-six years of the slums
of Leeds, and has weighed and measured many thousands