218 THE COMMON SENSE OF THE MILK QUESTION 



supply so pure as to be a safe food for babies. The 

 question arises, what is to be done in the meantime; 

 are we to go on letting the babies needlessly die until 

 such time as we have perfected our milk supply? 



Personally, I do not believe that the youngest 

 reader of these pages will live to see the time when 

 the ordinary milk supply of any large city will be 

 satisfactory for infant feeding. With Dr. Brush, I 

 believe that we need a separate dairy for producing 

 milk fit for infants' food, that we need to separate 

 the production of milk for infants entirely from the 

 commercial milk supply.^' As Dr. Brush has pointed 

 out, the dairy cow is a tuberculous animal, and as a 

 rule, the tuberculous cow is a more abundant milk- 

 giver than the non-tuberculous cow.'' The reason for 

 this is that we have bred cows solely for dairy pur- 

 poses, inbreeding to an extent which has weakened 

 them. One can go into almost any large dairy estab- 

 lishment when animals are condemned for slaughter 

 as a result of the application of the tuberculin test, 

 and discover for himself that the condemned animals 

 are, in many cases, among the best and most abun- 

 dant milk-givers in the herd. Everything has been 

 sacrificed to getting an abundance of milk containing 

 a high percentage of fats and solids at the cheapest 

 possible rate. Very often the cow that is undesir- 

 able for ordinary dairy purposes, her milk being of 

 small quantity and deficient in fats, would make a 



