But the advocates of the great campaign against
infant mortality have always maintained that the actual mortality is
only one effect of the causes which produce it. When people have said
that the loss of a certain number of babies mattered little, we have
always replied that for every baby killed many were damaged. This
contention has now been proved up to the hilt in the remarkable
official enquiry, the first of its kind, made by Dr. Newsholme, now
Chief Medical Officer of the Local Government Board.[26] He studied
infant mortality in relation to the mortality of children and young
people at all subsequent ages, and he proved, once and for all, that
infant mortality is what we have always maintained it to be, not merely
a disaster in itself but an evidence of causes which injure the health
and vigour of the survivors at all ages. Wherever infant mortality is
highest, there child mortality is highest, and the mortality of boys and
girls at puberty and during the early years of adolescence when the body
is preparing for and becoming capable of parenthood. The evil conditions
that cause infant mortality are thus proved to be far-reaching and much
wider in their effects than any but the students of the subject have yet
realized.
This chapter must be brought to a close, but it may be added that the
emergence of sober nations, such as Japan and Turkey, into contemporary
history, and the possibilities latent in China,--to mention none other
of the "dying nations," so very much alive, at whom glass-eyed
politicians used to sneer--constitutes one of the major facts of
contemporary history.
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