The reasons why children should be suckled at their mothers’ breasts are larger than some may be inclined to believe.  In the first place the psychological reason is one of no mean importance.  The breast with its exquisitely sensitive nipple, vibrating in harmony with the sexual organs, furnishes the normal mechanism by which maternal love is developed.  No doubt the woman who never suckles her child may love it, but such love is liable to remain defective on the fundamental and instinctive side.  In some women, indeed, whom we may hesitate to call abnormal, maternal love fails to awaken at all until brought into action through this mechanism by the act of suckling.

A more generally recognized and certainly fundamental reason for suckling the child is that the milk of the mother, provided she is reasonably healthy, is the infant’s only ideally fit food.  There are some people whose confidence in science leads them to believe that it is possible to manufacture foods that are as good or better than mother’s milk; they fancy that the milk which is best for the calf is equally best for so different an animal as the baby.  These are delusions.  The infant’s best food is that elaborated in his own mother’s body.  All other foods are more or less possible substitutes, which require trouble to prepare properly and are, moreover, exposed to various risks from which the mother’s milk is free.

A further reason, especially among the poor, against the use of any artificial foods is that it accustoms those around the child to try experiments with its feeding and to fancy that any kind of food they eat themselves may be good for the infant.  It thus happens that bread and potatoes, brandy and gin, are thrust into infants’ mouths.  With the infant that is given the breast it is easier to make plain that, except by the doctor’s orders, nothing else must be given.

An additional reason why the mother should suckle her child is the close and frequent association with the child thus involved.  Not only is the child better cared for in all respects, but the mother is not deprived of the discipline of such care, and is also enabled from the outset to learn and to understand the child’s nature.

The inability to suckle acquires great significance if we realize that it is associated, probably in a large measure as a direct cause, with infantile mortality.  The mortality of artificially-fed infants during the first year of life is seldom less than double that of the breast-fed, sometimes it is as much as three times that of the breast-fed, or even more; thus at Derby 51.7 per cent. of hand-fed infants die under the age of twelve months, but only 8.6 per cent. of breast-fed infants.  Those who survive are by no means free from suffering.  At the end of the first year they are found to weigh about 25 per cent. less than the breast-fed, and to be much shorter; they are more liable to