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11
[1910
INFANTILE MORTALITY.
Infant Deaths, 634; Mortality Rate, 87.—There were 634 deaths
among infants under twelve months old during the year, or 255 below the
decennial average (889), and they represented an infant mortality rate of 87
per 1,000 infants born. This rate is 20 per 1,000 below the mean annual
record of the preceding ten years, and with one exception (86 per 1,000 in
1912) is the lowest rate hitherto recorded.
The gradual decrease in recent years in the infant mortality of the country
is the subject of a leading article in its issue of Whit Monday of the "Daily
Telegraph," in which it states that, "during the last fifteen years, during which
attention has been paid to maternal and infant welfare, the mortality amongst
infants has decreased by nearly one-third, and mortality amongst women from
circumstances connected with childbirth by rather more than one-fourth. We
are therefore encouraged to make more strenuous efforts, and supplied with
adequate reasons for hope. We see what the evil is; we have already discovered
some means of combating it, and we know also that there has been
an immense decrease in the avoidable maternal suffering. It need scarcely
be added that the unprecedented circumstances of the war have given an
additional stimulus to the supreme importance of the subject. The value of
population has never been so appreciated as it is to-day. If we had been
more careful for the last fifty years to prevent the unheeded waste of infant
life we should now have had at least half-a-million more men available for the
defence of the country."
This last sentence may express the military point of view, which, though
a practical one, is, nevertheless, a very poor reason in a Christian country. It
would have been far better if the case had been based on the view which
Charles Dickens, who loved children and hated to see them suffer, would
have no doubt taken, that is the humanitarian one. He would have pointed
out that many thousands of infants, not only in London but throughout our
country, come into the world half developed, tortured with preventable pain
and shorn of their natural capacity for health and enjoyment. He would, as
he has done, reminded us of that delightful paper on "Dream Children"
written by Charles Lamb, once a citizen of Islington, and then he would have
conjured up before us, as he has before others, the dream children we love,
the dearer dream children we have lost, the children we might have had, the
children we certainly have been; and he would have told us how each of these
dream children should hold in its pleading hand one of the little children now
lying in some charitable Institution, or perishing in some mean home, and
each of these dream children should say to us, "O help this supplicant in my