The awakening of the world to a consciousness of the immense sacrifice of infant life is recent. Most of it has come within the last twenty years.
The economic importance of this subject in certain of the European countries, especially Germany and France, has engaged the attention of the governments, and there t he question of infant mortality is being studied with great interest. This has been forced on the attention since in all European countries a steadily declining birth-rate is evident. This decline in the last twenty-five years in eleven European countries has been from an average of 33.7 per thousand of population to 30 per thousand, or about 10 per cent. of births. The fall is least in Ireland, Norway and Sweden, and greatest in England, Germany, Italy, Austria and Hungary. No such decline is as yet apparent in this country, owing to the influx of