_Radical Solution of the Problem._--It is one of the most important aims of child-protection that during the first year of life the infant should be nourished at the maternal breast. Every possible effort must be made to secure that the infant should not be separated from its mother; and if separation from the mother is unavoidable, that the child should not be hand-fed, but suckled by a wet-nurse. Finally, when artificial feeding of the infant is inevitable, it is the aim of child-protection to secure that the technique of this feeding should be the best possible. Two of the institutions of modern civil law are of such a nature as to favour wet-nursing and hand-feeding, and to hinder the attainment of the primary aims of child-protection. The first of these is that, within limits, the parents are free to determine how their child shall be brought up; so that, for instance, the mother is free to entrust her child to a wet-nurse, or even to have it brought up by hand. Hence the reform of these matters must begin with legislation securing that the legal position of legitimate and of illegitimate children shall be identical; and, secondly, imposing it upon all mothers as a legal obligation to suckle their own children when they are physically competent to do so. The last-named measure is by some considered too radical, on the ground that its enforcement would infringe the sacred principle of the freedom of contract, and would violate the sanctity of family life. But these are merely empty phrases; and such considerations cannot for a moment counterbalance the urgent need for the proper protection of infant life. Even to-day, it is an accepted legal principle that in the case of contracts involving the personal service of the contracting parties within the limits of family life, the contract cannot be fulfilled by proxy. Thus, in the matter of the nourishment of an infant during the first months of life--that is to say, in respect of the performance of an act which is merely the continuation and the sequel of the physiological state brought into being by sexual intercourse and by pregnancy, the demand that no substitution be allowed, that lactation by proxy be prohibited, is a logical application of existing and accepted legal principles. In the sphere of family life, the principle of the freedom of contract finds even to-day no more than a restricted application; and with the disappearance of the economic order based upon free competition, the principle of the freedom of contract is destined altogether to disappear. Beyond question, the suggested reform would involve a very serious limitation of personal liberty. But the limitation would be no greater than those that are imposed in most modern States by various ordinances affecting the right of the individual to the free disposal of his own body--for instance, compulsory military service, compulsory vaccination, and compulsory removal to a hospital for infectious diseases.