Mr. Harris-Gastud in his late report to the British Foreign Office on Prussia, after mentioning the north-eastern provinces of that country, and the immorality, drunkenness and thieving propensities of its peasantry, thus continues (p. 361): "The system of contract laborers, under obligation to bring one or two other laborers into the field, is in some measure responsible for the immorality, inasmuch as the one or two, so to speak, gang-laborers, are usually girls, who live in the same room as the family. Children are not carefully tended and reared. The wives are obliged to work daily throughout summer and autumn, and on many properties in winter also. They go very early to work, are free half an hour before midday to prepare the dinner and do other household work, and return to work till sunset. The children come badly off. Often there is no older child to take charge of the little ones, who are consequently left to themselves in the house. A direct result is the great mortality of children. From 1858 to 1861 there died in the province of Prussia, out of a total population of 2,190,072, an annual average of 21,290 children under one year, and of 40,845 children under ten years, being 0.97 and 1.86 per cent. of the population; whereas in the Rhine province, with a population of 2,112,959, the percentages were 0.57 and 1.12 respectively." In 1870 in the United States, with a total population in town and country of 38,558,371, the number of deaths of children under one year was 110,445, and under ten years 229,542, being 0.29 and 0.59 respectively. In other words, where one child dies in the United States, _two_ die in the Rhenish provinces of Prussia, and _more than three_ in one of the north-eastern provinces.