ocialist cannot fail to see that a society which neglects to
introduce order at this central and vital point, the production
of the individual, must speedily perish.

It is involved in the proper fulfilment of a mother's relationship to her
infant child that, provided she is healthy, she should suckle it. Of
recent years this question has become a matter of serious gravity. In the
middle of the eighteenth century, when the upper-class women of France had
grown disinclined to suckle their own children, Rousseau raised so loud
and eloquent a protest that it became once more the fashion for a woman to
fulfil her natural duties. At the present time, when the same evil is
found once more, and in a far more serious form, for now it is not the
small upper-class but the great lower-class that is concerned, the
eloquence of a Rousseau would be powerless, for it is not fashion so much
as convenience, and especially an intractable economic factor, that is
chiefly concerned. Not the least urgent reason for putting women, and
especially mothers, upon a sounder economic basis, is the necessity of
enabling them to suckle their children.

No woman is sound, healthy, and complete unless she possesses
breasts that are beautiful enough to hold the promise of being
functional when the time for their exercise arrives, and nipples
that can give suck. The gravity of this question to-day is shown
by the frequency with which women are lacking in this essential
element of womanhood, and the young man of to-day, it has been
said, often in taking a wife, "actually marries but part of a
woman, the other part being exhibited in the chemist's shop
window, in the shape of a glass feeding-bottle." Blacker found
among a thousand patients from the maternity department of
University College Hospital that thirty-nine had never suckled at
all, seven hundred and forty-seven had suckled all their
children, and two hundred and fourteen had suckled only some.
The chief reason given for not suckling was absence or
insufficiency of milk; other reasons being inability or
disinclination to suckle, and refusal of the child to take the
breast (Blacker, _Medical Chronicle_, Feb., 1900). These results
among the London poor are certainly very much better than could
be found in many manufacturing towns where women work after
marriage. In the other large countries of Europe equally