The evil is apparent, but the remedy is not so obvious. That no woman should be permitted to work during a period of six or eight weeks immediately before and after childbirth may be agreed, but then the necessity arises for some adequate means of securing her proper maintenance during her necessary and enforced idleness. To forbid her employment without making provision for her needs would possibly be an even greater evil than now cries for remedy. The question really resolves itself into this: Is civilized man equal to the task which the savage everywhere fulfils? Private philanthropy has occasionally grappled with this problem and the results have been highly significant of what might be accomplished if what has been done as a matter of charity in a few cases could be done generally as a matter of justice and right. Of these private experiments perhaps the most famous of all are those of the celebrated Alsatian manufacturer, M. Jean Dolphus, and the Messrs. Fox Brothers, of Wellington, Somerset, England. M. Dolphus found that in his factory at Mülhausen, where a large number of married women were employed, the mothers lost over 40 per cent of their babies in the first year, though the average at that age for the whole district was only 18 per cent. He noticed, moreover, that the mortality was greatest in the first three months of life, and that set him thinking of a remedy. He decided therefore to require all mothers to remain away from their work for a period of six weeks after childbirth, during which time he undertook to pay them their wages in full. The results were astonishing, the decrease in infantile mortality in the first year being from more than 40 to less than 18 per cent.[35] Other employers followed with similarly beneficent results, among these being the firm of Fox Brothers, who employed considerably over one thousand persons, more than half of whom were women. They paid wages for three weeks only, but provided excellent _crèches_ with competent matrons in charge for the care of the infants whose mothers were at work. There, also, the infantile death-rate was very materially reduced, though, owing to the fact that no statistics showing the rate among children whose mothers were employed by the firm prior to the introduction of the plan exist, it cannot be statistically represented. Mr. Charles H. Fox, head of the firm, is authority for the statement that the reduction was extensive.[36] The importance of these experiments, especially in conjunction with the experiences of Paris in the great siege and Lancashire in the cotton famine, cannot easily be overestimated. They clearly show that not only hunger, but that other aspect of poverty hardly less important, the neglect of infants through industrial conditions which force the mothers to neglect them, are responsible for an alarming sacrifice of life year by year, and that it is possible to reduce materially the rate of infant mortality by improving the economic