circumstances of the parents. X No study of this problem can be regarded as satisfactory which ignores the question of poverty and its relation to the number of still-births, yet we can only touch briefly upon it. No brutal Malthusian cynicism, but a calm view of such facts as those cited, leaves the impression that, however it might be under other and more humane social conditions, still-birth means very often a child’s escape from a life of suffering and misery. It is surely better that a babe should be strangled in the process of delivery from its mother’s womb, never to utter a cry, than that it should live to cry of hunger which its mother cannot appease, or from the torture of food unsuited to its little stomach! When a mother suffers all the pain and anxiety caused by the struggling life within her, and in her travail goes down to the brink of the grave, only to be mocked at last by a lifeless thing, she suffers the supreme anguish of her kind. Last year there were more than 6000 such tragedies in the city of New York alone, and the number in the whole country was probably not less than 80,000. Some of the best authorities upon the subject of vital statistics insist that still-births should be included in the death-rates, and in many foreign cities, notably Berlin,[37] they are so included. If such a method were adopted in this country, it is easy to see how important the effects would be upon the tables of mortality. Whatever opinions they may hold upon the moot question of regarding still-births as deaths in all enumerations, all authorities appear to agree that the circumstances of the mothers influence the numbers of the still-born as surely as they do the actual infantile death-rates. Six physicians of large obstetrical experience were asked to estimate what percentage of the still-born should be ascribed to the influence of poverty, and the average of their replies was 60 per cent. [Illustration: BABIES WHOSE MOTHERS WORK CARED FOR IN A _CRÈCHE_ ]