As in all human problems, ignorance plays an important rôle in this great problem of childhood’s suffering and misery. The tragedy of the infant’s position is its helplessness; not only must it suffer on account of the misfortunes of its parents, but it must suffer from their vices and from their ignorance as well. Nurses, sick visitors, dispensary doctors, and those in charge of babies’ hospitals tell pitiful stories of almost incredible ignorance of which babies are the victims. A child was given cabbage by its mother when it was three weeks old; another, seven weeks old, was fed for several days in succession on sausage and bread with pickles! Both died of gastritis, victims of ignorance. In another New York tenement home a baby less than nine weeks old was fed on sardines with vinegar and bread by its mother. Even more pathetic is the case of the baby, barely six weeks old, found by a district nurse in Boston in the family clothes-basket which formed its cradle, sucking a long strip of salt, greasy bacon and with a bottle containing beer by its side. Though rescued from immediate death, this child will probably never recover wholly from the severe intestinal disorder induced by the ignorance of its mother. Yet, after all, it is doubtful whether the beer and bacon were worse for it than many of the patent “infant foods” of the cheaper kinds commonly given in good faith to the children of the poor. If medical opinion goes for anything, many of these “foods” are little better than slow poisons.[22] Tennyson’s awful charge is still true, that:— “The spirit of murder works in the very means of life.” Nor is the work of this spirit of murder confined to the concoction of “patent foods” which are in reality patent poisons. The adulteration of milk with formaldehyde and other base adulterants is responsible for a great deal of infant mortality, and its ravages are chiefly confined to the poor. It is little short of alarming that in New York City, out of 3970 samples of milk taken from dealers for analysis during 1902, no less than 2095, or 52.77 per cent, should have been found to be adulterated.[23] Mr. Nathan Straus, the philanthropist whose Pasteurized milk depots have saved many thousands of baby lives during the past twelve years, has not hesitated to call this adulteration by its proper name, child-murder. He says:— “If I should hire Madison Square Garden and announce that at eight o’clock on a certain evening I would publicly strangle a child, what excitement there would be! “If I walked out into the ring to carry out my threat, a thousand men would stop me and kill me—and everybody would applaud them for doing so. “But every day children are actually murdered by neglect or by poisonous milk. The murders are as real as the murder would be if I should choke a child to death before the eyes of a crowd. “It is hard to interest the people in what they don’t see.”[24]