There is a group of diseases which are fatal to infants soon after birth. They have been steadily increasing during the last half-century, and call for special notice here, as they seem to indicate physical degeneration as well as personal immorality of a dangerous and perhaps even a criminal nature. _Five-year _Proportion of Deaths Average_ to 1,000 Births_ _Premature _Congenital Births_ Defects_ 1861-1865 11.19 1.76 1866-1870 11.50 1.84 1871-1875 12.60 1.85 1876-1880 13.38 2.39 1881-1885 14.18 3.23 1886-1890 16.1 4.2 1891-1895 18.4 4.7 1896-1900 19.6 4.9 1901-1905 20.2 5.9 1906-1909 20.0 6.6 The large increase during the last forty-five years of very early infantile deaths, involving abnormalities of mother or child, seems very significant. The first may be connected with the increasing dislike of child-bearing, and unsuccessful attempts to avoid it. The second indicates some injurious condition of life of the mother, such as working at unhealthy or even deadly trades, which has certainly been largely increasing during the same period. Such work for young married women should be impossible in a civilised community. * * * * * On the vast subject of prostitution, of which the present movement for the suppression of what is called "The White Slave Traffic" is but one of the aspects, I do not propose to dwell, because I can find no statistics to show whether it has increased or decreased during the last century. But as the conditions have all been favourable for it, I have little doubt that it has increased in proportion to population. Such conditions are, the enormous growth of great cities; an increasing number of unmarried and wealthy young men; with an enormous number of girls and young women whose wages are insufficient to provide them with the rational enjoyments of life. The proceedings of the Divorce Courts show other aspects of the result of wealth and leisure; while a friend who had been a good deal in London Society assured me that both in country houses and in London various kinds of orgies were occasionally to be met with which could hardly have been surpassed in the Rome of the most dissolute emperors. Of war, too, I need say nothing. It has always been more or less chronic since the rise of the Roman Empire, but there is now undoubtedly a disinclination for war among all civilised peoples. Yet the vast burden of armaments, taken together with the most pious declarations in favour of peace, must be held to show an almost total absence of morality as a guiding principle among the governing classes. In this respect, the increasing power of Labour-parties all over the world seems to afford the only hope of a real moral advance.