The proposed reform would knit closer the bonds between mother and child, and it would curtail the love of personal luxury and the pleasure-seeking of the women of the well-to-do classes. The legal measure here suggested was known to the old Prussian law, and to this law alone. It does not appear in any legal code of to-day. The two reasons that prevent its immediate adoption by any modern State are these: in the first place, it would affect the women of the upper classes much more than those of the lower, and would expose the former in especial to punishment; in the second place, a necessary corollary of any such law would be the provision for women of the lower classes of a suitable allowance for maintenance during the period of lactation. CHAPTER III THE CARE OF FOUNDLINGS, WET-NURSING, AND BABY-FARMING _Terminology._--In this work, when we speak of “the care of foundlings,” the term is used throughout in the widest signification, to denote the general care of the children boarded out, or otherwise placed in external care by the Poor Law Boards or other administrative instruments of poor-relief. Thus we do not refer to the care of all abandoned children, nor even to the care of all foundlings, but merely to the care of children permanently and completely abandoned by their relatives. It is necessary to lay this great stress upon the accurate definition of the term, for the reason that in Germany and in England the systems by which the community undertakes the care of foundlings is fiercely attacked; but the opponents of the institution are attacking something very different from what many of them imagine. To-day the care of abandoned children, and institutions for the care of these children, are altogether different from the foundling hospitals of former times; abandoned children are cared for by the community, not only in countries in which foundling hospitals exist, but also in Germany and England, for in these latter countries, the so-called Germanic system for the care of abandoned children, though there not spoken of as “care for foundlings,” amounts to the same thing.