This page has been validated.
CHAP. IV.]
Infantile Mortality.
49

year alone (the year 1871) more than 18,000 infants under one year died in England and Wales from pneumonia and bronchitis. If that is not a massacre of innocents, I should like to know what is. And yet this mortality does not represent a hundredth part of the mischief done, for we have to take into consideration all those thousands who, although surviving these diseases and others, such as scarlet fever, measles, whooping-cough, mumps, and croup, the dangers of which are vastly increased by exposure to cold, have been permanently injured by them.

The evils of cold are clearly shown by the enormous death-rate of cold countries—a death-rate chiefly made up by infantile mortality. During the year 1883 the mortality from zymotic diseases was nearly twice as great in New York as in London, and the excess in the mortality from diseases of the respiratory organs and from consumption was very marked. The death-rate of children is proportionately high, for while in London the deaths of children under five years of age were 65.1 per thousand, in New York they amounted to no less than 90.3.

In Russia the mortality is frightful, 60 per cent, of those born, actually more than one-half, dying before they are five years old, and nearly two million children perishing there every year. In some parts of the Czar's dominions the average duration of life is only twenty-six years, and thus Russia shows the highest death-rate of any European country. Of eight million boys born, less