These are terrible words coming as they do from a great physician and teacher of physicians. Upon any less authority one would scarcely dare quote them, so terrible are they. They mean that practically the whole 8645 infant deaths recorded from measles in the United States in the year 1900 were due to poverty—to the measureless inequality of opportunity to live and grow which human ignorance and greed have made. Moreover, the full significance of this impressive statement will not be realized if we think only of its relation to one disease. The same might be said of many other diseases of childhood which blight and destroy the lives of babies as mercilessly as the sharp frosts blight and kill the first tender blossoms of spring. The same writer says: “It may be taken for granted that no healthy infants suffer from convulsions; those who do are either rickety or the children of neurotic parents.”[17] And there were no less than 14,288 infant deaths from convulsions in the United States in the census year. It would probably be a considerable underestimate to regard 10,000 of these deaths, or 70 per cent of the whole, as due to poverty. It is not my intention to attempt the impossible task of sifting the death returns so as to measure the sum of infantile mortality due to poverty. These figures and the table which follows are not introduced for that purpose; I have taken only a few of the diseases more conspicuously associated with defective nutrition and other conditions comprehended by the term poverty, and, supported by a strong body of medical testimony, made certain more or less arbitrary allowances for poverty’s influence upon the sum of mortality from each cause. Some of the estimates may perhaps be criticised as being too high,—no man knows,—but I am convinced that upon the whole the table is a conservative one. No competent judge will dispute the statement that some of the estimates are very low, and when it is remembered that only a few of the many causes of infantile mortality are included and that there are many others not enumerated in which poverty plays an important part, I think it can safely be said that in this country, the richest and greatest country in the world’s history, poverty is responsible for at least 80,000 infant lives every year—more than two hundred every day in the year, more than eight lives each hour, day by day, night by night throughout the year. It is impossible for us to realize fully the immensity of this annual sacrifice of baby lives. Think what it means in five years—in a decade—in a quarter of a century. TABLE SHOWING INFANTILE MORTALITY FROM ELEVEN GIVEN CAUSES AND THE ESTIMATED INFLUENCE OF POVERTY THEREON