The Feeding of the Children.

Otago Witness, Issue 2355, 13 April 1899, Page 52

The Feeding of the Children.

We are all agreed that not only is improper and deficient feeding the cause of an immense number of deaths among infants, but that it is also responsible for the puny stature and the stunted minds of many who grow up only to be an expense to the community of .which they form a part. We need hardly be surprised, then, to find that a claim is being put in for the feeding of the infants at the public expense. Of course, it is rank socialism; of course, improvident parents who marry young, or even without marrying cast these infants upon the world, are bad, wicked, heartless, and everything that is evil; but still, there the children are, and the question 'is, What is to be done with them? If left alone unhelped, it is clear that in many cases they must either serve merely to swell the infant death-rate, or must grow up puny and deformed, a ready prey to disease and vice, and a curse to the community; and in view of the free gift of education which at enormous expense is forced upon a not altogether willing people, simply because it has been decided that it is good policy that children should be educated, it is not altogether unnatural that people should be found to ask. Is it not good also that children should be fed? And would it not be better to spend public money for a short time during infancy in securing that they shall grow up strong and straight and fit to earn a living, rather than to spend money in their support daring those long years in after life when, in consequence of their imperfect development, they have become inmates of workhouses and reformatories and- gaols? Shall we, then, give free food as well as free education? in other words, shall we subsidise poor mothers to help them to bring up their offspring as valuable citizens instead of as "wasters" ? It is an anxious question, and one of the very next that will have to come forward. With the tremendous birthrate of the Anglo-Saxon race, children have, so far, been of small account. But the birthrate is diminishing, and the market /alue of children ought to rise; and after all, a child, more than any animal that comes into the world, ought to be worth the rearing. Crowded although the population .is, each good worker leaves the world a little richer; while each child spoilt in the rearing drags down the rest. And, so far as economics are concerned, that is the bottom of the question.—The Hospital.