In England the high infantile mortality has occasioned much alarm and called forth much agitation. There is a world of pathos and rebuke in the grim truth that the knowledge that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get suitable recruits for the army and navy has stirred the nation in a way that the fate of the children themselves and their inability to become good and useful citizens could not do.[11] Alarmed by the decline of its industrial and commercial supremacy, and the physical inferiority of its soldiers so manifest in the South African war, a most rigorous investigation of the causes of physical deterioration has been made, with the result that on all sides it is agreed that poverty in childhood is the main cause. Greater attention than ever before has been directed to the excessive mortality of infants and young children. Of a total of 587,830 deaths in England and Wales in 1900 no less than 142,912, or more than 24 per cent of the whole, were infants under one year, and 35.76 per cent were under five years of age. That this death-rate is excessive and that the excess is due to essentially preventable causes is admitted, many of the leading medical authorities contending that under proper social conditions it might be reduced by at least one-half. If that be true, and there is no good reason for doubting it, the present death-rate means that more than 70,000 little baby lives are needlessly sacrificed each year. No figures can adequately represent the meaning of this phase of the problem which has been so picturesquely named “race suicide.” Only by gathering them all into one vast throng would it be possible to conceive vividly the immensity of this annual slaughter of the babies of a Christian land. If some awful great child plague came and swept away every child under a year old in the states of Massachusetts, Idaho, and New Mexico, not a babe escaping, the loss would be less than those that are believed to be needlessly lost each year in England and Wales. Or, to put it in another form, the total number of these infants believed to have died from causes essentially preventable in the year 1900 was greater than the total number of infants of the same age living in the following six states,—Connecticut, Maine, Delaware, Florida, Colorado, and Idaho. Even if the estimate of the sacrifice be regarded as being excessive, and we reduce it by half, it still remains an awful sum.