Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/674

658 wounded, though these, more than the killed, may determine the issue of the war.

Let me now tell of another loss of work and of money through sickness and early death. In all the estimates I have yet referred to, no account is taken of those who are ill or die before they are fifteen years old. They are not reckoned as in the working-time of life, though in some classes many thousands of them are. (In the domestic, agricultural, and industrial classes of the Registrar-General nearly half a million of them are included.) And yet the losses of work due to sickness among children must be very large. Consider the time which might be spent in good productive work, if it were not spent in taking taking care of them while they are ill. Consider, too, the number of those who, through disease in childhood, are made more susceptible of disease in later life, or are crippled, or in some way permanently damaged; such as those who become deaf in scarlet fever, or deformed in scrofula or rickets, or feeble and constantly invalid, so that they are never fit for more than half-work, or for work which is only half well done. These losses can not be counted, but they must be large; and there are others more nearly within reckoning; the losses, namely, which are due to the deaths of those who die young. If they had lived to work, their earnings would have been more than sufficient to repay it; but they have died, and their cost is gone without return. The mortality of children under fifteen in 1882 was nearly a quarter of a million; what have they cost? If you say only £8 a piece, there are more than £2,000,000 sterling thus lost every year. But they have cost much more than this, and much more still is lost by the loss of the work they might have lived to do.

It is, indeed, held, I believe, by some that these things should not be counted as losses; that we have a surplus of population, and that really the deaths of children, though they may be the subjects of a sentimental sorrow, can not reasonably be regretted. I can not bring myself to admit that such a thing should even be argued. I have lived long in the work of a profession which holds that wherever there is human life it must be preserved; made happy, if that can be; but, in any case, if possible, preserved; and no argument of expediency shall ever make me believe that this is wrong. Indeed, I am rather ashamed—even for the purpose I have in view—to use so low an argument as that of expediency in favor of the saving of health and of life. I am ashamed of making money appear as a motive for doing things for which sufficient motives might be found in charity and sympathy, and the happiness of using useful knowledge; but it seems certain that these are not yet enough for all that should be done for the promotion of the national health; therefore, it seems well to add to them any motives that are not dishonorable; and so I add this, that we lose largely not only in happiness but in wealth by the deaths of these poor children.