=Dr. Farr’s Tables.=--It is most unfortunate that there should be such a lack of medical and statistical evidence as to the effect of factory labour upon the health of mothers. For this, I suppose, we shall have to wait for the gradual development of the human element in statistical science, though local medical evidence can be produced to shew the mischief that is constantly caused to the mother’s health. This question of infant mortality is at any rate beyond the region of the speculative, and all schools of thought, however divided they may be by the great controversy between freedom and the regulation of women’s labour, must be agreed that it would be nothing short of a national disgrace to allow matters to drift on year after year as they have been doing for many years past. It is now twenty years since Dr. Farr, the great health statistician, shewed the waste of life that was going on in the textile centres. He took the towns of Oldham, Nottingham, Manchester, Salford, Leeds, Norwich, Portsmouth, and London, found the number of women of twenty years and upwards who were engaged in the textile manufactures and household duties in each, and then worked out the particulars of infant mortality from 1873 to 1875. The result, which is to be found in a table in his work on _Vital Statistics_, is extremely striking. Thus, in Oldham, where 11,178 women were set down as engaged in textile manufacture, out of a total of 32,343 women of twenty years of age and upwards, the infant death rate per thousand births stood at 180; in Nottingham, where upwards of half the women were similarly employed, at 200; in Manchester and Salford, where a quarter of the women were engaged in textile manufacture, at 188; in Portsmouth, where there is no textile work, 146; and in London, where there is also none, 159.