_Causes of the Failure to Suckle._--The reasons for a mother’s failure to suckle her infant may be classified under two main heads: she will not, or she cannot. Unwillingness plays a great part among the upper classes of society. Dread of inconvenience, laziness, fear of the loss of physical charms, social duties and pleasures to which such women devote a great deal of time, and which they are unwilling to renounce--such are the considerations operative in these cases. Inability to suckle is a more frequent cause among women of the proletariat. In consequence of their poverty, such women are often forced to work away from home the whole day long. It is not yet definitely ascertained whether constitutional inability to suckle is commoner among proletarian women than among women of other classes. It is a greater evil for a proletarian mother to fail to suckle her infant than it is for a mother of the upper classes similarly to fail. The proletarian mother cannot afford to pay a wet-nurse, and the child must therefore be artificially fed. In this event, the proletarian mother is likely to feed her child less well than an upper-class mother who also adopts artificial methods of feeding, for the former is too poor to obtain the best milk, and she lacks time to prepare the milk properly, and to give it to her child in suitably small quantities and at suitably short intervals. The idea that a smaller proportion of mothers of the poorer classes suckle their children than among the well-to-do is erroneous. But it is a fact that of those children who are not suckled by their own mothers, among the upper classes a much larger proportion are suckled by wet-nurses than among the lower classes; it is also the case that when children of the upper classes are not suckled by their own mothers, they commonly have wet-nurses in their own homes, and are not entrusted to the care of foster-parents; and finally, when we come to hand-fed children, among the upper classes a greater proportion of these are comparatively well fed than among the lower. A smaller percentage of illegitimate than of legitimate children are suckled by their own mothers; a larger percentage of the illegitimate than of the legitimate are artificially fed. The unmarried mother is in most cases poor, the birth of the child makes her poverty extreme, and by no means always does she receive a maintenance allowance from her child’s father. To be able to live, she must either act as wet-nurse to another woman’s child, or must go out to work.