24 Human Physiology. 



And gin and beer are poisons as well as opium. What, 

 then, must be the condition of children begotten by drunken 

 fathers, nourished by the alcoholic blood of drunken mothers 

 before they are born, fed on alcoholic milk from the breasts of 

 drunken mothers or nurses, children drunk in the cradle, 

 drunk at the breast, drunk in the womb? 



During the year 1862, inquests were held by coroners in 

 England and Wales on the bodies of 3239 infants under one 

 year of age. In 124 cases verdicts of wilful murder were 

 returned. In the same year inquests were also held on 2763 

 children above one year, and under seven. In 1 863 there were 

 3664 inquests on infants under one year; the verdicts of wilful 

 murder numbered 166. There were also 2842 inquests in the 

 same year on children above one and under seven. 



A writer in the Pall Mall Gazette tells us that "every living 

 man of average health possesses in himself the power for the 

 creation of sufficient wealth to support himself and a family in 

 comfort, provided the machinery of civilisation is in healthy 

 working order. It is only through individual vice or crime, or 

 from some radical defect in the social or political system, that 

 the birth of a child is a source of poverty, and not a positive 

 addition to the prospective wealth and well-being of the world. 

 The hideous sanitary and moral debasement of the cholera 

 beds of East London, and the wholesale slaughtering of men 

 and women, and still more of children and infants, which is 

 always going on there, is the work of man, although no hand 

 is literally lifted up to strike the fatal blow." 



I read in the same journal that the crime of child murder 

 prevails to such a frightful extent in Liverpool that the atten- 

 tion of Government has been directed to it, with the view of 

 stringent measures being taken for its suppression, and the 

 Home Secretary has authorised . the Borough Coroner to offer 

 rewards for the detection of the guilty parties. 



Dr. Lankester, Coroner of Middlesex, has publicly stated 



