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 to the fact that Jewesses are better mothers.  “The Jewish children in the slums,” says William Hall (British Medical Journal, October 14, 1905), speaking from wide and accurate knowledge, “were superior in weight, in teeth, and in general bodily development, and they seemed less susceptible to infectious disease.  Yet these Jews were overcrowded, they took little exercise, and their unsanitary environment was obvious.  The fact was, their children were much better nourished.  The pregnant Jewess was more cared for, and no doubt supplied better nutriment to the foetus.  After the children were born 90 per cent. received breast-milk, and during later childhood they were abundantly fed on bone-making material; eggs and oil, fish, fresh vegetables, and fruit entered largely into their diet.”  G. Newman, in his important and comprehensive book on Infant Mortality, emphasizes the conclusion that “first of all we need a higher standard of physical motherhood.”  The problem of infantile mortality, he declares (page 259), is not one of sanitation alone, or housing, or indeed of poverty as such, “but is mainly a question of motherhood.”

The fundamental need of the pregnant woman is rest.  Without a large degree of maternal rest there can be no puericulture.[4] The task of creating a man needs the whole of a woman’s best energies, more especially during the three months before birth.  It cannot be subordinated to the tax on strength involved by manual or mental labor, or even strenuous social duties and amusements.  The numerous experiments and observations which have been made during recent