FOUNDLINGS, ETC.

Secondly, by societies for the care of orphans and abandoned children, the leading principle of which is opposed to the vicious one of aggregation, and favors separation and diffusion by boarding out the children among ordinary families. This is best represented by the Catholic Orphanages of Ireland, and the Protestant ones of Prussia.

Third, by temporary asylums, or transient homes, of which one of the best specimens is the Massachusetts Asylum, established last year at Dorchester, and now located in Brookline. The Secretary well says:

"The tendency in all civilized countries is toward the Family System, through first, the Foundling Hospital, and second, the Asylum or Home System; and the mortality among infants of this class is reduced from 90 or 95 per cent. under the old no-system, to from 40 to 60 per cent. in well managed Foundling Hospitals; from 30 to 50 per cent. in good Asylums, and from 20 to 35 per cent. in good single families, the last being scarcely above the normal deathrate of all infants."

It is to be hoped that the American mind, with its strong tendency to "short cuts," will find a direct way for the foundling into the existing natural families without the medium of any asylum. The most that is needed is an organization by which the transfer can be made with the least possible delay.

The mortality of 48 per cent., which occurred during the first six months of the existence of such an excellent and faithfully administered institution as the Massachusetts Asylum, is an indication of the extreme liability of all such establishments to epidemic diseases. True, that mortality was apparently the result of accidental, not inherent causes; but the vicious principle of aggregation will almost certainly develop such evil consequences in some shape or other. One baby is as much as one family should have at one time.

The late Secretary thinks that much of the mortality among infants of all classes is easily preventable, and that the amount of preventable mortality among motherless children is relatively greater than in any other class.

This is a very hopeful, if not oversanguine view. Much may indeed be done to lessen the mortality. Some accounts lead

FIFTH ANNUAL REPORT, 1868.

to the inference that much has been done; but imperfect statistics are two-edged swords; and this very matter of Foundling Hospitals shows how they may be made to cut both ways.

Persons who call for the establishment of hospitals and asylums for foundlings and abandoned children, plead the fearful mortality among those who are neglected. They show that a large proportion of those unfortunates die on door-steps, in police-stations, and in almshouses; and say with forcible truth that something must be done to prevent this.

The something done, is usually building of Foundling Hospitals; and the statistics of these prove that the mortality is seldom below 50, and sometimes approaches to nearly 100 per centum; so that it would seem that a motherless infant has hardly more chance of life in the hospital than it would have in a police-station or an almshouse.

If it be said that the mortality in Foundling Hospitals can be greatly reduced from the former rates of 70, 80, and even 90 per cent., and is reduced by modern appliances in the best hospitals to below 50 per cent., it may be replied that the average mortality of children under one year of age in our three State Almshouses, for the past four years has been diminishing, and by the introduction into those establishments of appliances at hand in the Foundling Hospitals, it could doubtless be reduced in the same ratio as it has been in them.

Indeed it may be maintained that, all things considered, the annual death-rate of infants in our almshouses is not large compared with that of infants of the poor throughout the Commonwealth, of whom so many perish in the blossom.* Moreover, if we could take fully into account, the constitutional condition of infants found in the almshouses, and the existence of causes which predispose them to early death, and then compare the mortality with that of ordinary children in Irish families, it would probably appear that nearly as large a proportion may be saved in the almshouses, as are saved in private houses.

But the truth is, that no correct inferences can be drawn even from correct statistical tables of mortality among foundling and

* Of all born in Massachusetts there die under one year of age 13.47 per cent.

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in the country there die under one year of age 12.62 per ct. "Suffolk County there die under one year of age 17.42 per cent.

ABORTIONS.

abandoned children, without considering that many of them come from vitiated stock; and that the mothers of many were in a deplorable condition of mind and body before their birth. They could not bring forth sound offspring.

Moreover, in many cases the bud had been assailed with murderous intent, even before it blossomed into life.

Those whose duty leads them to investigate and set forth the causes and consequences of crime may not shrink from examining the most repulsive of them. Two of these will be here noticed: First, attempts at abortion, and their consequences. Second, the hereditary taint of most of the children who come under the charge of the State.

Attempts at abortion are fearfully frequent; and those which do not end in the immediate death of both child and mother, or of one of them, produce mischievous consequences.

There is a prevalent belief that certain drugs act directly and specifically to destroy the germ that has been vivified within the female organs, without other effect upon the system. And there are those who infer from the supposed existence of such agencies the propriety of their use. The assumption is false, and the inference is impious; for it implies that God has been party to murder before the fact, by providing special instruments of destruction.

Noxious agencies do indeed exist, but none destructive of human life which act specifically and solely upon the newly conceived infant life.

The little embryon is so hidden in the very core of the mother; so wrapped up and guarded by her vital organs, that no shock can affect it, except through her; no blow can be aimed at its life, by drug or knife, without endangering hers. A woman may, indeed, give to her whole system such a direful shock that some one of the organs may break down, or its functions be reversed; but, unless the uterine organs happen to be weaker than the others, the effects of the shock are hardly more likely to be felt there than elsewhere.

But, in any case, great harm is done somewhere. Certainly to the woman's general health; probably to some special organ.

FIFTH ANNUAL REPORT, 1868.

The blow may possibly destroy the infant life; but this can only be by endangering the mother's life also.

It is all gross and criminal empiricism. It is like firing a cannon ball, by night, into the hull of a ship, to kill some one particular man on board. The ball is sure to damage, possibly to destroy the vessel. It is likely to hurt or kill somebody; and it may possibly hit the one aimed at; but he is no more endangered than his comrades.

And yet unprincipled wretches stalk through the land, and audaciously offer themselves to destroy infant life, for a price. They force their false doctrines, and their poisonous drugs before the public eye in flimsily disguised advertisements.

Surely the law which threatens such offenders, and even those who advertise their medicines, with the State prison, ought not to be a dead letter.

Diseased Condition of Foundlings and Abandoned Children in our Almshouses.

It is well known that a large proportion of the foundlings and abandoned children gathered into European Hospitals and into our Almshouses, are tainted by that hideous disease which must have come from the most venomous fang of the serpent which bit the heel of mankind.

Woe to the bodily tabernacle into which it once enters; for it is one of those evil spirits which not even prayer and fasting can cast out. With slow, painless, insidious, resistless march, it penetrates into the very marrow of the bones, and poisons the fountains of life beyond purification. All may look fair without, and feel fair within, but the taint is there, and it affects the offspring; though the evil humor may disguise itself, and the disease reappear in some of the protean forms of scrofula. This evil humor resists even the healing influence of the recuperative principle longer and more stubbornly than any other disease, so that children suffer even to the third and fourth generation.

This is painfully evident to those who carefully inspect the bodily condition, and consider the peculiar diseases which char

ABANDONED WOMEN.

acterize the children gathered into our Almshouses, Reformatories and Asylums.

Surely the curse of a disease so malignant, so contagious, so persistent and so transmissible, implies that nature regards purity of relations between the sexes to be sacred; and that she punishes its gross profanation with liability to dreadful consequences.

She readily "forgives unto the sons of men other sins and blasphemies wherewith soever they may blaspheme," but this one, like "him that blasphemeth against the Holy Spirit, hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation for he has an unclean spirit."

The effects of this disorder in corrupting the human stock, and predisposing offspring to disease, are more wide-spread, and more deadly than is usually believed. They are hardly exceeded by the effects of alcohol. When both are combined we have the lowest depths of human degradation.

The theory that mankind has been slowly developed out of the original condition of mere animals, finds seeming support in the asserted fact that a half idiotic slave girl, having brought forth a child, in a by-place, gnawed off the umbilical cord, which instinct leads animals to do. But we have melancholy proofs that drunkenness and licentiousness, transform women into creatures more monstrous than the animal kingdom can produce. Such women when forcibly retained from their haunts, and kept in our almshouses to nurse their infants, sometimes obstinately refuse to do so; and will bear the excruciating pains of a "broken breast" rather than comply. Nay! they have to be carefully watched lest they slay their children. Fierce passions utterly smother even their maternal instincts. Our almshouse keepers can testify that sometimes no amount of vigilance prevents these poor creatures from accomplishing the death of their children, that they may get their own freedom. In order to obtain this, some might, but for fear of punishment, perhaps of the death penalty, burn the building with all its inmates, their own children included, and rush madly to their old wallowings.

Brothels and dram-shops, in centres of dense population, can

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