The infantile death-rate is higher among the lower classes than it is among the upper. Within the limits of those making up what are termed “the lower classes,” the infantile death-rate is higher in proportion as the social conditions are unfavourable. The figure attained by the infantile death-rate depends above all upon the social circumstances and the earning capacity of the parents. Inasmuch as an infant does not possess the faculty of spontaneous change of place or of other spontaneous activity, since it is unable even to express its needs in an intelligible manner, its fate depends upon the soil in which it grows--its very life depends upon its environment. Such, from the social standpoint, is the essential characteristic of the age of infancy. The infant born of well-to-do parents has better chances of life than the infant born of poor parents, for the former lives in more favourable circumstances, and receives in every respect a better upbringing. It is a demonstrable fact that most children that die succumb, not from inherited weakness, but owing to the errors and defects of their upbringing. The materials available in proof of this proposition are ample and incontrovertible. Whatever the place, the time, and the other conditions submitted to investigation, and whether the investigated materials be large or small, we are led invariably to the same conclusions. In the bourgeois (middle and upper) classes, only 8 per cent. of the children die during the first year of life, but among the proletariat the infantile death-rate is 30 per cent. Even more significant, if possible, are the following facts. The infantile death-rate is higher among illiterate wage-earners than it is among literate wage-earners; it is higher among casual labourers than it is amongst wage-earners permanently occupied. In the strata of the population above the manual workers, we find that the infantile death-rate is lower as we pass from strata in which social conditions are comparatively bad to strata in which they are comparatively good. The infantile death-rate and the income of the parents vary in inverse ratio. The differences in the infantile death-rate as we pass from the poorer quarters of our towns to the richer quarters tell always the same tale.