children born in Lancashire are inherently weaker than the children
born in Rutland or Dorset--and there is not the shadow of a reason why
we should believe that--we must suppose that at least 161 children out
of every 1,000 in Lancashire were killed by the conditions into which
they were born. That excess of blackness in the third column over that
in the first represents a holocaust of children, that goes on year by
year, a perennial massacre of the innocents, out of which no political
capital can be made, and which is accordingly outside the sphere of
practical politics altogether as things are at present. The same men
who spouted infinite mischief because a totally unforeseen and
unavoidable epidemic of measles killed some thousands of children in
South Africa, who, for some idiotic or wicked vote-catching purpose,
attempted to turn that epidemic to the permanent embitterment of Dutch
and English, these same men allow thousands and thousands of avoidable
deaths of English children close at hand to pass absolutely unnoticed.
The fact that more than 21,000 little children died needlessly in
Lancashire in that very same year means nothing to them at all. It
cannot be used to embitter race against race, and to hamper that
process of world unification which it is their pious purpose to delay.

It does not at all follow that even the Rutland 103 represents the
possible minimum of infant mortality. One learns from the Register-
General's returns for 1891 that among the causes of death specified in
the three counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, and Hereford, where infant
mortality is scarcely half what it is in the three vilest towns in
England in this respect, Preston, Leicester, and Blackburn, the number
of children killed by injury at birth is three times as great as it is
in these same towns. Unclassified "violence" also accounts for more
infant deaths in the country than in towns. This suggests pretty
clearly a delayed and uncertain medical attendance and rough