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 unsatisfactory results are found.  In Paris Madame Dluska has shown that of 209 women who came for their confinement to the Clinique Baudelocque, only 74 suckled their children; of the 135 who did not suckle, 35 were prevented by pathological causes or absence of milk, 100 by the necessities of their work.  Even those who suckled could seldom continue more than seven months on account of the physiological strain of work (Dluska, Contribution a l’Etude de l’Allaitement Maternel, These de Paris, 1894).  Many statistics have been gathered in the German countries.  Thus Wiedow (Centralblatt fuer Gynaekologie, No. 29, 1895) found that of 525 women at the Freiburg Maternity only half could suckle thoroughly during the first two weeks; imperfect nipples were noted in 49 cases, and it was found that the development of the nipple bore a direct relation to the value of the breast as a secretory organ.  At Munich Escherich and Bueller found that nearly 60 per cent. of women of the lower class were unable to suckle their children, and at Stuttgart