nt when able to do so, has been insistently
made by others also. It has been supported from the legal side by
Weinberg (_Mutterschutz_, Sept., 1907). In France the Loi Roussel
forbids a woman to act as a wet-nurse until her child is seven
months old, and this has had an excellent effect in lowering
infantile mortality (A. Allee, _Puericulture et la Loi Roussel_,
These de Paris, 1908). In some parts of Germany manufacturers are
compelled to set up a suckling-room in the factory, where mothers
can give the breast to the child in the intervals of work. The
control and upkeep of these rooms, with provision of doctors and
nurses, is undertaken by the municipality (_Sexual-Probleme_,
Sept., 1908, p. 573).

As things are to-day in modern industrial countries the righting of these
wrongs cannot be left to Nature, that is, to the ignorant and untrained
impulses of persons who live in a whirl of artificial life where the voice
of instinct is drowned. The mother, we are accustomed to think, may be
trusted to see to the welfare of her child, and it is unnecessary, or even
"immoral," to come to her assistance. Yet there are few things, I think,
more pathetic than the sight of a young Lancashire mother who works in the
mills, when she has to stay at home to nurse her sick child. She is used
to rise before day-break to go to the mill; she has scarcely seen her
child by the light of the sun, she knows nothing of its necessities, the
hands that are so skilful to catch the loom cannot soothe the child. The
mother gazes down at it in vague, awkward, speechless misery. It is not a
sight one can ever forget.

It is France that is taking the lead in the initiation of the scientific
and practical movements for the care of the young child before and after
birth, and it is in France that we may find the germs of nearly all the
methods now becoming adopted for arresting infantile mortality. The
village system of Villiers-le-Duc, near Dijon in the Cote d'Or, has proved
a germ of this fruitful kind. Here every pregnant woman not able to secure
the right conditions for her own life and that of the child she is
bearing, is able to claim the assistance of the village authorities; she
is entitled, without payment, to the attendance of a doctor and midwife
and to one franc a day during her confinement. The measures adopted in
this village have practically abolished both maternal and infantile
mortality. A fe