of slum
children, besides examining over 120,000 boys and girls as to
their fitness for factory labor, states (_British Medical
Journal_, October 14, 1905) that "fifty years ago the slum mother
was much more sober, cleanly, domestic, and motherly than she is
to-day; she was herself better nourished and she almost always
suckled her children, and after weaning they received more
nutritious bone-making food, and she was able to prepare more
wholesome food at home." The system of compulsory education has
had an unfortunate influence in exerting a strain on the parents
and worsening the conditions of the home. For, excellent as
education is in itself, it is not the primary need of life, and
has been made compulsory before the more essential things of life
have been made equally compulsory. How absolutely unnecessary
this great mortality is may be shown, without evoking the good
example of Australia and New Zealand, by merely comparing small
English towns; thus while in Guildford the infantile death rate
is 65 per thousand, in Burslem it is 205 per thousand.

It is sometimes said that infantile mortality is an economic
question, and that with improvement in wages it would cease. This
is only true to a limited extent and under certain conditions. In
Australia there is no grinding poverty, but the deaths of infants
under one year of age are still between 80 and 90 per thousand,
and one-third of this mortality, according to Hooper (_British
Medical Journal_, 1908, vol. ii, p. 289), being due to the
ignorance of mothers and the dislike to suckling, is easily
preventable. The employment of married women greatly diminishes
the poverty of a family, but nothing can be worse for the welfare
of the woman as mother, or for the welfare of her child. Reid,
the medical officer of health for Staffordshire, where there are
two large centres of artisan population with identical health
conditions, has shown that in the northern centre, where a very
large number of women are engaged in factories, still-births are
three times as frequent as in the southern centre, where there
are practically no trade employments for women; the frequency of
abnormalities is also in the same ratio. The superiority of
Jewish over Christian children, again, and their lower infantile
mortality, seem to be entirely due