“It has been suggested to us by persons experienced in the peculiar dangers of institutions for infants of tender years, that the high death rate, especially the excessive death rates after the first few weeks of life, right up to the age of three or four, may be due to some adverse influence steadily increasing in its deleterious effect the longer the child is exposed to it. In the scarlet fever wards of isolation hospitals it has been suggested that the mere aggregation of cases may possibly produce, unless there are the most elaborate measures for disinfection, a dangerous ‘intensification’ of the disease. In the workhouse nursery there is practically no disinfection. The walls, the floors, the furniture, must all become, year after year, more impregnated with whatever mephitic atmosphere prevails. The very cots in which the infants lie have been previously tenanted by an incalculable succession of infants in all states of health and morbidity.” “Is the long undertaker’s bill to be deplored, considering the parentage of this class of children and the way the Guardians rear them?” The nation wants the babies; indeed, to maintain its position it must have them, and “the tendency of nature is to return to the normal”--a scientific fact of profound civic importance. Besides, the Report says:-- “We find that it is generally assumed that the women admitted to the workhouse for lying-in are either feeble-minded girls, persistently immoral women, or wives deserted by their husbands. Whatever may have been the case in past years, this is no longer a correct description of the patients in what have become, in effect, maternity hospitals. Out of all the women who gave birth to children in the Poor-Law institutions of England and Wales during 1907, it appears that about 30 per cent were married women. In the Poor-Law institutions of London and some other towns the proportion of married women rises to 40 and even to 50 per cent.” As to how the Guardians rear the babies that is another matter. But let us leave Institutions with the high walls, the monotony which stifles, the organization which paralyses energy, the control which alike saps freedom and initiation, and the unfailing provision of food no one visibly earns, so that we may go and visit some of the homes which the Guardians subsidize, and where they keep, or partially keep, out of the ratepayers’ pockets 163,801 children.