OBJECTIVE.
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It hardly seems credible, at first thought, that the class through whom such an aggregate of loss may be, and really is, inflicted upon the state, is composed of the young girls between the ages of eleven and twenty-one, engaged in our industrial pursuits by which their injury is effected. The mortality tables of our cities and manufacturing towns hint at the facts, but rarely include this class under such “ causes.” Our hospital wards do not often receive them until special agencies of disease have become secondary or general; but their out-patient rooms and the “dispensaries” are familiar
vision to turn life to the best account, —to give life, careless whether it will be bale or boon to its recipient, — is the sin of sins. Every other sin mars what it finds: this makes what it mars.”
“Physiological inquiries will serve to develop these changes to some extent; facts of observation are likewise in abundance: and both prove that a body worn down and debilitated, although the generative faculty may be uninjured as to intensity in either sex, cannot give the necessary pabulum for the production of a vigorous offspring, endowed with active vitality.”— Gaskell: The Manufacturing Population of England, p. 109.