The question of reducing the rate of infant mortality is, it will be seen from the foregoing, most complicated. It is not without reluctance and misgiving that I have ventured upon this detailed discussion of measures to that end, and in doing so I have kept from speculation and theory, confining myself almost entirely to those measures which have been tested by experience and found beneficial. If Berlin has been able to reduce its infantile death-rate from 200 per thousand to 80 per thousand, Australia to reduce its rate from 15 per cent to 8 per cent; if Rochester can reduce its summer death-rate of infants by 50 per cent, it is surely evident that, given the determination to do so, we can at least hope to save one-half of the babies who, under present conditions, are perishing each year. In other words, it is possible to save almost 100,000 babies annually from perishing in the first year of life. No greater, worthier task than this ever challenged the attention of a great nation. IX When all the evidence is piled up, we are irresistibly driven to the conclusion that no attempt to educate hungry, ill-fed children can be successful or ought to be attempted. Danton’s fine phrase rings eternally true, “_After bread_, education is the first need of a people.” That education is a social necessity is no longer seriously questioned. But the other idea of Danton’s saying, that education must come after bread,—that it is alike foolish and cruel to attempt to educate a hungry child,—is often lost sight of. In the early days of the public agitation for free and compulsory education, it was not infrequently urged that before the state should undertake to compel a child to attend its schools and receive its instruction, it ought to provide for the adequate feeding of the child. That argument, happily, did not prevent the establishment and development of public education, but now that the latter system has been firmly rooted in the soil of our social system, there is an increasing belief in the inherent wisdom and justice of the claim that the state has no right to attempt to educate an unfed or underfed child.[172]