TEE WASTE OF CHILDREN 55 * 



babes, believed more largely in a Providence whose decree was in- 

 exorable, who gave and who took away ? From this morbid fatalism the 

 medical advance of the past one hundred years and the strenuous efforts 

 of men with human sympathies applying themselves to problems of 

 social betterment have freed the majority of our kind, and the doctrine 

 is properly relegated to the category of abandoned beliefs. The triumph 

 over small-pox has been one of the results contributing to this end. 

 Formerly it was a scourge carrying away large portions of the popula- 

 tion. Two thirds of all new-born children are said to have been at- 

 tacked, of whom one eighth or more regularly died. A frightful 

 mortality thus obtained, and this was minimized only through the in- 

 troduction of vaccination, which in some countries increased the 

 average duration of life as much as three and one half years. Owing 

 to this direful experience of the past, foreign countries are still more 

 insistent than we are upon employing that method of preventing the 

 disease. 



France has paralleled the record of England, and, when once 

 inaugurated, improvements and reforms succeeded with astonishing 

 rapidity. During the first seven years of the last century, the num- 

 ber of male inhabitants reaching an age sufficient to subject them to 

 conscription was but 45 per cent, of the total number born, yet by 

 1825 the percentage had risen to 61 — a most healthful gain in the 

 proportion of those attaining adult life. Backward Eussia has been 

 equally a laggard in its attention to the moral and social require- 

 ments winch result in a low infantile death rate. At the beginning 

 of the nineteenth century it permitted one third only of the children 

 of its peasants to grow up to maturity and as few as 36 per cent, of 

 its population reached the age of twenty years. Even here science has 

 made advance. 



The great changes in the social and economic conditions of the 

 European people have had a marked effect upon the growth of the 

 population. As the power and ability of men to control the conditions 

 of their environment were increasingly realized, beneficent effects were 

 everywhere noticeable. To recuperate the strength lost in war and 

 disaster, men urged the device of a decreased death rate instead of 

 striving as formerly for a larger percentage of births. An observing 

 demographer in the first half of the last century thus expressed himself, 

 ' Population does not so much increase because more are born as be- 

 cause fewer die/ Yet the population of nearly every country has 

 increased wonderfully during the past century, and in view of the 

 new conditions of its expansion what a fine commentary upon the 

 advance of modern civilization and the practical efficiency of govern- 

 ment this tremendous fact has been ! 



From this former dismal reality with its merciless slaughter of 

 helpless babes we in America have made much progress. Accurate 



