chapter he speaks of a "new kind of drunkenness unknown to our ancestors which is lately sprung up amongst us and which if not put a stop to will infallibly destroy a great part of the inferior people—that, namely, which is acquired by the strongest intoxicating liquors and particularly of that poison called gin."
In 1761 we come across another aspect of the question. In that year an Act was passed for the registration of children under four years of age received into workhouses. The Act was passed largely owing to the exertions of a Mr Hanway, the mortality amongst parish children at that time being enormous. Mr Hanway gives instances in which every child received into workhouses under a twelvemonth old had died within the year. Child desertion reached an appalling figure owing to the facilities provided by the Poor Law and by the Foundling Hospital. Of the latter we are told that the admissions increased from 100 in 1756 to 4000 in 1760. "Infants were sent to them from villages 50, 100, or even 200 miles distant." The conditions were the same in Paris, where they had their Hospices des Enfants Trouves. Of 18,000 children baptised in Paris in 1768, 6000 were received in the Foundling Hospital. Arthur Young tells us that of 100,000 received in this manner in sixteen years, only 15,000 survived. Speaking of Foundling Hospitals, he says that they "encourage that vicious procreation which from its misery will not deserve the name of population … an encouragement of vice and inhumanity, and a public premium given to the banishment of the best feelings of human nature." Child desertion is still a very burning question, as everyone who has administered the Poor Law will know, but at least we can say that we have nothing approaching such conditions in these days. Infantile mortality is
