Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/485

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It is evident that if a family demands these luxurious standards for their children, they can hardly obtain them for more than two children even with five thousand a year. It would seem that "the simple life," which Pastor Wagner came from France to teach us a decade ago, has not yet been entered upon by any of us who have the means to live otherwise. Even the poor avoid simplicity as much as possible, witness the elaborate shirt-waists and "picture-hats" often worn by working-girls and the great sums spent on liquor and cigars by working men.

So much for the economic factors in the birth rate. Let us now consider the closely related subject of infant mortality. It is now generally agreed that the best single antidote to this national evil is breast-feeding for nine full months, or as long as possible, and that in this respect the poor infant fares better on the average than the well-to-do. In spite of this advantage, however, the infant death rate is much higher among the poor than among the wealthy. Dr. Fischer, of New York, for example, found that of 500 very poor women in that city 90 per cent, nursed their children over nine months, while of 500 prosperous mothers only 17 per cent, nursed for the same period. When we learn, however, that 154 of these rich infants were supplied with wet-nurses, we see that, after all, 48 per cent, of them were breast-fed.

German investigations do not show such a striking difference between the percentages nursed by poor and by rich mothers; and the figures quoted by Dr. Fischer are undoubtedly too low for the American middle-class and probably also too high for the average working-class. A doctor, who has delivered 300 women in a country town in California, informs me that only six of them failed to nurse. We must turn to Germany for reliable statistics on nursing in different economic classes. In the city of Barmen (population 150,000) in 1905 the following percentages of infants were being nursed in the four different classes, into which the parents were divided according to income: