Infant mortality : its causes and remedies.

Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Infant mortality : its causes and remedies. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    and Vagabonds, in th^t part of the United Kingdom called Eng- land ;' and every woman so neglecting to maintain her bastard child, after having been once before convicted of such offence, and every woman deserting her bastard child, whereby such bastard child becomes chargeable to any parish or union, shall be punishable as a Rogue and Yagabond under the provisions of the last recited Act. The only comment which we shall allow ourselves to make on such legislation, will be to state the conclusions at which the contemplation of it has reluctantly forced us to arrive. We are always loth to attribute improper motives or aims to our law-givers, past or present; we would fain believe that every man who undertakes to serve his country, is zealous for that country's good; but facts are sometimes too strong for our wishes. The laws relating to seduction, and those relating to illegitimacy, each taken separately, are bad enough; looked at together, as links in a single chain, they give a terrible shock to our faith in the morality of English statesmanship; and when we turn from them to the recent Acts for the cure of contagious disease, and study the defence of the latter, advanced by their apologists, we cannot resist the conviction that all these measures have sprung from the same poisonous root,—the notion which some would have us receive as an axiom of moral and social science, that vice is necessary to men, and being necessary, should go unpunished and unchecked ; the duty of Parliament towards it being limited to the discovery of means for obviating, to some extent, the evils which it entails upon society. And as these laws, taken together, bear damning testimony to their immoral origin, so do they supply proof that successive Parliaments have acquiesced in this interpre- tation of their duty ; for if they had really set before themselves the task of repressing the vice which is the parent of seduction and illegitimacy, their first act would have been, by the imposition of severe penalties upon all who should seek to lead girls astray, to mark their belief in a power of self-control inherent in man; their second, by giving every facility for the discovery of a putative father, and by exacting from him the strictest discharge of his duties towards his illegitimate child, to proclaim their intention of upholding impartially and to the full, the principle of parental responsibility; their third, by an indignant rejection of every proposal based upon the doctrine of the necessity of vice, to. cUds