The Registrar-General’s Returns.—It is obvious that the influence of occupation upon the health of married women cannot be adequately considered without some inquiry as to its effects upon the life and health of their children. As is the case with so many other vitally important branches of industrial life, there is but scanty information of a statistical kind here to guide us, though there is enough local information, taken in conjunction with the general statistics which are published from time to time by the Registrar-General, to establish a close relation between the employment of married women and a high infantile rate of mortality. In his annual report, the Registrar-General goes into the subject in some detail. He begins by pointing out that the year 1891 showed that the proportion of deaths of infants under one year to a thousand registered births was 149 per thousand, a proportion which was equalled in 1886, and slightly exceeded in 1890, but was otherwise higher than in any year of the preceding decennium. He remarks upon the wide differences to be found between the rates in the various counties, and the persistence of these differences from year to year; “the general rule being that the rate is lowest in the purely agricultural, and highest in the mining counties and those of the textile industries. It is in the towns of these latter counties that the infantile mortality assumes the highest proportion; the three towns which are invariably, or almost invariably, the worst in this respect being Preston, Leicester, and Blackburn.”

This is highly significant, and but for the fact that statistics have been successful in isolating several towns associated with certain industries in which married women are very largely employed, it might have been urged that the high rate of mortality in the towns was simply due to density of population, lack of fresh air, space, and sunlight. But the Registrar-General, by the tables which he has compiled in his last report, enables us to judge as to the effect upon child life, first, of country air and conditions; secondly, of the average urban conditions; and thirdly, of urban conditions plus the employment of women in factory labour. Seeing that Preston, Leicester, and Blackburn had the highest infantile death-rates of all the towns included in the weekly returns from 1881 to 1891, he has selected them for what we will call Group III. Then he has taken five mining or industrial counties, namely, Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Lancashire, West Riding, and Durham; and three agricultural counties, namely, Hertfordshire, Wiltshire, and Dorsetshire. With the help of the death registers of the various counties and towns for the years 1889, 1890, and 1891, tables have been prepared showing the causes of death and the exact ages of infants under a year old who had died, out of one hundred thousand born in each of the various districts.

Age-periods and Mortality.—The table shews at a glance that there are more than double as many deaths in the selected towns as in the rural counties—22,000 as against 10,000, whilst the manufacturing counties stand at 17,000. It must, however, be observed that this last group contains the textile districts and various other typically unhealthy trade areas, so that it is scarcely a fair criterion. An examination of more detailed statistics which have been reduced to a tabular shape shew, as the Registrar-General points out, that in the rural counties and the three selected towns the mortality is at its maximum in the first week, falls heavily in the second week, remains at much the same level during the third week, and then shews a fresh very considerable decline in the fourth. To summarise his conclusions as to the points of likeness between counties and towns: “Both shew an excessively high mortality in the earliest days of life, which becomes less and less as days, weeks, and months pass by, until the seventh or eighth month has elapsed, when the decline either is arrested or becomes very much smaller. In both the mortality is so high in the first three days, or even in the entire first week, that, were it maintained without diminution, every infant would die without nearly completing one year of its existence.” But now coming to the points of difference. We have seen in the first place that the town rate is more than twice as high as the country. But the town rate is not merely higher for the whole period, but higher for each fraction of the year. Moreover, the town rates are most in excess of the country ones, not in the earliest weeks or months of infancy, but in the later months. “In the first week of life, the town rate exceeds the rural rate by 23 per cent., in the second week by 64 per cent., in the third week by 83 per cent., and in the fourth week by 97 per cent. The same result comes out when the rates for successive months in the counties and towns are examined. In the first month the town mortality is 27 per cent. above the rural rate, in the second month 121 above it, and the excess then goes on increasing until in the sixth month it amounts to no less than 273 per cent. This is the month in which the difference is greatest, though it remains throughout the rest of the year at a not very much lower point.” This progressive increase is a most significant fact, and it is much to be wished that instead of concluding his examination at the limit of one year of age, the Registrar had continued it, say up to five years, so that he might have been able to form some notion of the further loss of life which falls upon the children in the districts where their mothers are employed in the mills and factories. There is not space here to reproduce the two tables in which the Registrar-General enumerates the causes of death in the rural and town districts, together with the ages at which death takes place. But these tables are of such extreme importance that it may be well to compare some of the more general causes of death.

The following table shews the period of death in the two districts respectively:—

Relation of Married Women’s labour to Infant Mortality. Dr. Tatham’s Evidence.—The most striking difference between the rural districts and the selected towns is in the case of diarrhoea, which, taken with enteritis, shews a mortality seven times as great in towns as in the country. These figures tell their own tale, but it may be well to add the testimony of Dr. Tatham, for many years the medical officer for Manchester and Salford, as given before the labour Commission. “In the year 1881 my attention was first seriously directed to the employment of young mothers in factories, in the course of my investigations concerning the causes of our abnormally heavy infant mortality, Salford being one of the great English towns in which infant mortality was year after year notoriously excessive. As a result of anxious inquiry, extending over many years, I was, and still am, convinced that very much of that excessive mortality was due to infant neglect, consequent on the withdrawal of maternal care within a few weeks of the birth of the children. In consequence of this practice the infants were frequently consigned to the care of some ignorant neighbour, or were nursed at home by an older child of the family. The children were artificially and often improperly fed, and a heavy death-roll was the ultimate result.”

Questioned by the Chairman as to the time, in his opinion, a mother should remain at home after the birth of the child, Dr. Tatham said, “I should not be consistent if I said less than six months.”

“That of course in your opinion would have a very important influence upon the rate of mortality?” “I think it would.”

“And upon the nurture of the children?” “I think so.”

“Is it within your experience that a considerable number of young married women work in factories?” “A very large number.”

“You speak of the effect upon infant mortality; could you say anything of the effect upon the mothers themselves?” “I have no doubt that the health of the mothers will be damaged. It must be so, I am sure; that part of the subject has not engaged my attention so much as this terrible question of infant mortality.”

It may also be interesting to add the one question which was asked by the representative of the manufacturing interest, Mr. Tunstill, a cotton spinner—“Have you considered the financial question that is involved in this recommendation of yours?” And the answer, “I have purposely avoided that; I leave that to those much better able to judge of it than I am.”

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.

Recent Statistics.—But in 1891 the infantile death rate in the worst textile towns exceeded any of the figures produced by Dr. Farr. Thus in Preston the mortality was 220. There is a slight improvement, but only slight, in the other towns investigated by Dr. Farr. Thus in Oldham the rate is 171 instead of 180, in Manchester 178 instead of 188. None of the figures that have been published, however, give anything like an adequate account of the real state of affairs. What we want is a statement confined to the children of those employed in any given industry where married women’s labour is prevalent. To take an entire town like Manchester or Salford is only to approximate to the facts. In both these towns there are healthy suburbs and large numbers of well-to-do people whose children are taken away every year to the seaside, and there are many industries which are healthy, and where no women’s labour is employed. But anyone who cares to take the trouble to examine the Registrar’s report, and to work out the death rates of the poorer quarters of Manchester and Salford, Bradford, Burnley, and Blackburn, or to take the Potteries and make similar calculations for Hanley, Burslem, and Stoke will be appalled by the contrast between the figures of those places and the rural death rate. He will find that, instead of being twice as high, the rate of infant mortality is even four or five times as high as in the country districts. Such figures as we have however, are sufficient, as I have said, to shew the close connection between the employment of mothers in mills and the death of children.

Deterioration of Survivors.—As to the deterioration of the survivors there can be no question. The evidence of Dr. Tarrop, quoted before, and of other certifying surgeons is conclusive on this point. That school of thought which frames its industrial policy on the theory of the survival of the fittest, can scarcely point to any very triumphant results in the districts which we have been considering. They may assert, and will no doubt continue to assert, that the wholesale sweeping-off of damaged lives in the early months is a great boon to the race, and that the survivors, having stood the ordeal, are presumably more or less seasoned for the discharge of their functions. It must be pointed out, however, that the tests applied are one and all unnatural ones, and that if the laws of nature are to be consulted we shall be right in assuming that the children who have died are those who were best fitted to live. For what are we to think of the standard of living which subjects all new-comers to their capacity of assimilating adulterated and unhealthy food, dispensing with maternal care, breathing air which is foul, and existing without sunshine? Yet this is the kind of test which the pseudo-scientists of the day are so proud of applying, and the result is a weedy, sickly, unnatural generation, brought up without regard to any one of the most fundamental laws of nature. It would be every bit as reasonable to evolve a system of botany which rejected, as extinct or dying, families of plants, which could not be cultivated in a dark chamber or in a refrigerator, as to create conditions of industrial life without reference to the laws of nature or the teachings of health, and then to argue that the fitness of the race depends upon compliance with them.