by engaging paid nurses instead of pauper women, to take care of the
children. In Massachusetts the experience is equally instructive. "In
the State Almshouse," says the able Secretary of the Board of Charities,
Mr. F. B. Sanborn, "the mortality of these infants previous to 1857,
reached the large proportion of 80 out of every 100."

In the Tewksbury Alms-house the mortality in 1860 among the foundlings
was forty-seven out of fifty-four, or eighty-seven per cent.

In 1867, the most enlightened experts in charities in Massachusetts took
up the subject of founding an Infant-Asylum, and resolved to institute
one which should be free from the abuses of the old system. In this new
Asylum only those children should be received whose cases had been
carefully investigated, and no more than thirty foundlings were ever to
be collected under one roof, so that as much individual care might be
exercised as is practicable. Yet even under this wise plan the mortality
during the first six months at the Dorchester Asylum reached nearly
fifty per cent, out of only thirty-six children; though this mortality
was a great gain over that of the State Alms-houses.

The truth seems to be that each infant needs one nurse or care-taker,
and that if you place these delicate young creatures in large companies
together in any public building, an immense proportion are sure to die.
When one remembers the difficulty of carrying any child in this climate
through the first and second summers, and how a slight change in the
milk, or neglect of covering, will bring on that scourge of our city,
cholera infantum, and how incessant the watchfulness of our mothers is
to bring up a healthy child, we can understand why from one-half to
two-thirds of the foundlings, many of them fatally weakened when brought
to the Asylums, die in our public institutions. Where the mothers are
allowed to take care of their own children in the Asylums, as many
survive as in the outside world. But to support one mother for each
infant is an immense expense; so that two children are commonly put
under the care of the mother. The neglect, however, of the strange child
soon becomes apparent even to the casual visitor; and these poor
foundlings are often fairly starved or abused to death by the mother
forced to nurse them. The treatment of these poor helpless infants by
brutal women in our public institutions is one of the saddest chapters
in the history of human wickedness.

What,