Under the heading of "The Wastage of Child Life" the
Times of Thursday publishes an interesting account of an experiment carried out in the Yorkshire industrial village of Longwood, one of the wards of the borough of Huddersfield. The village stands high and is free from slums, but the great majority of the inhabitants are factory workers, and though the general death-rate has been low for the last ten years, the average infant mortality up to the period of the experiment was one hundred and twenty-two per thousand births. The method of attempting to reduce this wastage has been twofold : first, the promise to pay £1 for each baby born in the district between November 9th, 1904, and November 9th, 1905, on its attaining the age of twelve months ; and second, the systematic distribution of information as to the feeding, nursing, and tending of children, reinforced by the domiciliary visits of a small committee of ladies. The result of the experiment has been to reduce the infant mortality to fifty- four per thousand births, or more than fifty per cent. The principle of payment may be open to question ; it is, however, an effective offset to the abuse of the system of infant assur- ance, as that system too often works out. In any case, the promoters of the scheme are justified in pointing to the success of their operations as indicating that a high infant mortality is easily avoidable; that the mischief is more due to ignorance than neglect; that instruction is readily received ; and that the primary aim of any scheme to check wastage of child life must be the endeavour to help the mother in her home, never to separate mother and child.
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