_Wet-Nurses._--Poverty not only makes it impossible for many women to suckle their own infants, but forces them to suckle the child of another. The great majority of wet-nurses are recruited from the ranks of the proletariat, and, indeed, for the most part, belong to the class of unmarried mothers. Married women are less inclined to sacrifice their own child for the good of the child of another woman. The readiness of many mothers to renounce the duty of suckling their children is perhaps referable to the fact that wet-nurses may be procured so easily and at such small cost. Thus poverty is also an indirect cause of the fact that many upper-class mothers fail to suckle their children. The children of wet-nurses are either fed artificially, or suckled by another woman. The sad position of such children, and their enormous death-rate during the first years of life, are only too well known. When a woman takes employment as a wet-nurse, two children suffer--(_a_) the child she suckles, and (_b_) her own child, which would otherwise, in all probability, be suckled by its own mother. In favour of the traffic in wet-nurses, it is frequently maintained that the children of wet-nurses, owing to the good wages earned by their mothers, are well cared for, whereas otherwise they would be badly cared for. The sophistical character of this argument is sufficiently obvious. If a child is not suckled by its own mother, it is either suckled by another woman, or else artificially fed; and the child may either remain in its maternal home, or it may be sent to be reared elsewhere. If the infant is sent elsewhere, either its relatives or some benevolent society may arrange for its care. Wet-nurses are thus resident or non-resident. In foundling hospitals, those wet-nurses who give suck to children in the institution are known as resident wet-nurses. From the standpoint of civil law, resident wet-nurses have entered into a contract of service with their employer, and the latter undertakes to provide in return for their services a stipulated remuneration. A non-resident wet-nurse, on the other hand, undertakes to provide in a certain manner for the infant boarded with her. It is obviously preferable that an individual child should be suckled by a resident wet-nurse, since in such conditions the wet-nurse can be supervised much more strictly than when she receives the infant in her own home. But in the case of children in a foundling hospital, it is preferable that they should be boarded out with non-resident wet-nurses, for in the present condition of medical science, the institutional care of infants is a very difficult matter to carry out with success.