of which I am writing, and others like them,—that is, the reclaimed marsh lands lying near the mouths of the principal rivers which fall into the North Sea.
With wonderful accord this mortality was traced by seventy medical practitioners and other gentlemen well acquainted with the habits of the poor, who were consulted on the subject by Dr Hunter, the commissioner, "to the bringing of the land under tillage, i.e., to the cause which had banished malaria, and had substituted a fertile though unsightly garden for the winter marshes and summer pastures of fifty or a hundred years ago. It was generally thought that infants received no harm from malarious evils, but a much greater enemy had been brought against them when their mothers were forced into the fields."
By such authoritative testimony the cause is shown to be mainly due to the destruction of the maternal instinct in women whose lives are hardened and brutalized by unsuitable toil and continual contact with moral corruption, and by the neglect that must ensue when they are obliged to leave their babies to the care of others.
One-fourth of the infants lawfully born in these districts die under one year of age, while of the remainder the average amounts to one-third. Whatever the immediate occasion of death, all the medical men agree in believing the real cause to be the mother's neglect, while "the degree of criminality they attributed to the women varied from a sympathising excuse for their ignorance to a downright charge of wilful neglect with the hope of death,—in fact, infanticide."
The history of many an unfortunate infant is thus traced in the report:—Perhaps it is the immediate offspring of the gang system. Born into a household already burdened with too many mouths, its appearance in the world is unwelcome to every one. The young mother, called away to work, gives up her child to an old woman, who professes to keep a school for such babies. All the food the child gets from its mother is morning and evening. During the night she is too fatigued to attend to its wants; in fact, if she is to do her day's work, she cannot afford to lose her rest.
Both by day and night the child is either deprived of food, or
