78 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
tuberculosis and infant mortality is of pressing import and of 
vital necessity, and that infant mortality is now a problem of 
the life and death of the nation and all other problems are sec- 
ondary. 
These countries and even Belgium, with all her burdens, 
and the small neutral countries divert attention from details of 
fighting, and appeal to patriotism in language that every one 
understands. Dr. Louis C. Parkes, before the Royal Sanitary 
Institute, estimated that two years of war cost the five principal 
belligerent nations (England, France, Russia, Germany and 
Austria-Hungary) nine millions of males of military age. 
Adding losses sustained by other countries he brings the total 
up to twenty millions. The people in Europe are told to 
“Make up for the terrible wastage of war by conserving all the 
young life possible”; that ““The child should have a fair start 
in life and arrive at maturity physically fit to take his part in 
the heritage of the Empire’; “The nation needs men, more 
men, still more men, and the child is father to the man” ; “The 
nation survives in its young,” and so on. 
We think with horror of the number of American lives lost 
in Mexico, or on the high sea and in the danger zones and 
some of us demand action—to prevent these losses. Why 
should it take the awful shock of the unexpected or of war 
to make us see things? Why should not our health officers 
try to make our people see that our complacence in a steady 
calamity of more than one third of a million infant deaths 
yearly, is a terrible indictment? The conscience of Europe is 
touched by its infant deaths—it thinks it needs men to win its 
wars. 
We like to think it is an American belief and ideal that every 
child has the right to be protected from disease and to have a 
fair chance in life. When all of us fully realize that steps to 
lessen infant mortality are the most fundamental in the whole 
program of the conservation of national vitality, we will de- 
mand that health officers everywhere act. By demanding that 
they act I mean vote them funds for their work. 
There are people who say that any attempt to reduce infant 
mortality is an interference with natural selection which tends 
to lower the average health of survivors. But a human being is 
not merely the sum of his ancestors. If this were true perhaps 
