MIDWIVES AND INFANT-FEEDING.
[To THE EDITOR or THE " SPECTATOR.") your issue of August 27th An Inspector of Midwives" remarks :—" More midwives would mean paore breast-fed infants." It is a pity that these words cannot be placed, in large capital letters, upon the wall of each room in which any provincial Town Council ever meets. They deserve to be printed in letters of gold. For two years, in dozens of South-country and West-country English towns, I have been making (inter alia) an inquiry into the proportion of convicted criminals who were wholly bottle-fed in infancy. The result is startling. I propose to publish it next year for the benefit of other sociol- ogists. Our country towns are now mostly so well drained, so well supplied with good drinking-water, and so well policed, that breast-feeding has become almost the last great unsatis- fied need of the infant portion of their populations.—I am, Sir, (Editor of the Guardian's Instruction, 1897, dc.). Oxford Union Society, Oxford.
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