FOOTNOTES:
[1] Sir Frederick Bruce, in a recent report to the Foreign Office, says:
'The growth of Shanghai is wonderful; its population is estimated at 1,500,000, and it bids fair to become soon the most important city of the East. The Chinese flock to it on account of the security it enjoys; and the silk manufacture, which was destroyed by the Taiping occupation of Soochow and Hangchow, is taking root at Shanghai.'—Pekin, 30th April, 1863.
[2] Civilized nations profess to look with abhorrence on the Chinese crime of infanticide, and to believe that the statements of travellers and missionaries are incredible; but a careful examination of the mortuary tables of London, Paris, New York, Dublin, Moscow, and other cities, will show that infanticide is far more common than supposed. It is a crime easily hidden and hard to trace. Take the foundling hospitals as a guide to some approximate estimate of the amount of infanticide in France. We find that she has upwards of 360 hospitals; that in Paris alone, in five years, from 1819 to 1823, 25,277 children were received, of whom eleven thirteenths died, and that the annual number of enfans trouvés ranges from 3,800 to 4,500. These children, but for the hospital, would have been murdered. Who can tell how many are thrown into the sewers of Paris? A recent writer states the number at 10,000, but we deem this an exaggeration. It is significant that the percentage of births and deaths in all France is less far the births and greater for the deaths than in England. These tables we annex.
It is still more significant that the returns of foundling hospitals, from widely different countries, show that these institutions, however charitable and humane their object, are to be viewed as conveniences for murdering an infant without the actual violence at which humanity revolts. The proportion of abandoned children who live is so exceedingly small, that abandonment of a child to a foundling hospital is scarcely less than murder. If the child live, it may be viewed, almost, as a direct act of Providence.
Of 62,000 children brought into the Paris foundling hospitals, 52,500 died.
In Dublin, 19,420 children were received in ten years, of whom 17,440 died.
In Moscow, 37,000 children were received in twenty years, of whom 35,000 died.