Chief among these protests ranked that against the overwork of pregnant mothers, through which, as one of the most able opponents of existing evils, W. Stanley Jevons, wrote, “infinite, irreparable wrong is done to helpless children,” adding that the appalling infant mortality of the manufacturing districts attracted far less attention and interest in the public mind than the death of a single murderer.  At nearly the same time Mr. F.W.  Lowndes gave the fruit of long research in a paper read before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled “The Destruction of Infancy;"[26] and this was supplemented by testimony from experts, the Statistical Society adding weighty testimony to the same effect.[27]

From these and other official testimony it was found that in nineteen manufacturing towns,[28] out of 1,023,896 children [Forty-first Report of the Registrar-General, p. 36] born, 82,259 died in infancy.  The rate of mortality varied from 59.4 in Portsmouth through an ascending scale, being in London 78.6 and in Liverpool the almost incredible proportion of 103.6 per thousand.  In a rural country infant mortality does not exceed from thirty-five to forty per thousand.  The Report of the Select Committee on the Protection of Infant Life was filled with details so horrible that only the sworn testimony of experts made them credited at all.[29]

Dr. Hunter’s report on rural mortality shows that when mothers are employed in what are known as “field gangs” for out-of-door work, leaving their children in the charge of old women too weak for such labor as their own, that infants died like sheep.  Godfrey’s Cordial was the chief engine of destruction; the corps of inspectors who reported to the Government finding infants in all stages of prostration, from the overdoses of the popular specific warranted to render any attention from nurse or mother quite unnecessary.

As to the direct effects of factory or out-door labor on pregnant mothers, out of 10,000 births among factory mothers, there died from 1863-75 of children under one year of age, in Portsmouth 1,459, Liverpool 2,189, London 1,591, and other towns with textile industries 1,940.  Statistics taken in Germany and at other points all went to show that in the matter of out-door labor at the harvest season, when all women-workers are in the fields, the deaths of nursing infants were three times as great as in the other nine months.

For details and deduction from these facts the reader is referred to the reports themselves.  “I go so far,” wrote Mr. Jevons, “as to advocate the ultimate complete exclusion of mothers of children under the age of three years from factories and workshops;” and his conviction voiced that of every examiner into the situation as it stood at that time.