158 THE COMMON SENSE OF THE MILK QUESTION 



lives, equal to the loss of an army corps of 45,000 

 annually, through ignorance and neglect.* Suppose 

 that we knew that so many infants were actually 

 murdered in France during that time ; should we re- 

 gard the French people as being civilized ? Or should 

 we be regarded as civilized if we slew, with knives and 

 axes, 95,000, or the larger total, 158,000, babies a 

 year? And yet, why should we not face the truth 

 that it is not necessary to use knives or axes in order 

 to do murder — that it is just as easy to murder 

 babies with artificial foods that are poisons, or with 

 milk that is reeking with germs and filth, as with any 

 other weapons — just as easy and just as wrong ? 



That impure and infected milk is one of the chief 

 factors in the causation of excessive infantile mor- 

 tality is not questioned, so far as I am aware, by a 

 single living authority. Whether we take Russia 

 with its terrible death-rate of 272 per thousand' of 

 infants under one year old, Austria with its 227 per 

 thousand,' or New Zealand with its 82 per thousand,' 

 it is universally admitted that the frightful mortality 

 among bottle-fed babies as compared with breast 

 nurslings is due largely to diarrhoeal diseases caused 

 by dirty and contaminated milk, or to other diseases 

 caused by the ingestion of pathogenic bacilli con- 

 tained in milk drawn from infected cows or handled 

 by infected persons. And the fact of a univer- 

 sally declining birth-rate adds to the gravity with 



