Hence our sense of degradation and revolt—feelings which somehow are not provoked when the milk reaches us in a bright glass-bottle, or in a nice clean tin covered with printed matter—because all the degrading side of it is then hidden from our view.
The strange part of it, however, is that this sense of degradation and revolt is based upon fact; for not only on a priori grounds may we deny that goat’s milk or any other substitute can adequately replace breast-feeding, but we may also deny it from positive knowledge.
Years ago Dr Biedert showed that the most important differences between human and cow’s milk were qualitative rather than quantitative. A little later Dr G. von Bunge confirmed this view; and Dr Halliburton, the great physiologist, has recently repeated and emphasized it. It is impossible to enter here into the qualitative differences to which these authorities refer: suffice it to say that the gravity of the whole question from our standpoint lies not merely in the greater digestibility of human milk, but in the conspicuous difference between human milk and all other substitutes as a brain-developing food. Dr von Bunge, who calls attention to this point, claims not only that human milk is more complex than its substitutes, but that in it we find lecithin bodies in peculiar proportions, which serve for the construction of the inordinately large human brain.
It is not surprising that this important point should have been overlooked all this time. As we have already said, materialism is necessarily the creed of body-despisers. But, if Dr von Bunge’s view is correct, how severe must have been our loss in intelligence and genius, precisely owing to the decline in breast-feeding! Certainly the uncontrollable and increasing stupidity of our governing classes for over a hundred years, seems to point to the truth of von Bunge’s views; for it is among them that, for social reasons, artificial feeding has been, and still is, most common. Dean Inge comments somewhere on the increasing besottedness of modern people, and we entirely agree with his view; but we wonder whether it has ever struck him that the decline in breast-feeding, which is the outcome of his body-despising values, may be one of the most powerful contributory causes of it.
For we should always bear in mind, in comparing our poor spiritual achievements with the genial performances of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the pre-Victorian era, that the artificial feeding of infants is essentially a modern invention, and that it was unknown to antiquity.
From Plato down to Pope Alexander VI no one had ever heard of a baby’s bottle. The alleged ancient artificial feeder discovered in Cyprus by Franz von Löher was probably no more than an old traveller’s gourd or wine-bottle. As late as the fifteenth century the only kind of infant-feeding, other than breast-feeding by the mother, that was known, was that which a foster-mother, or so-called wet-nurse, could provide. Metlinger in 1473 appears to be the first to mention cow’s milk as a substitute, and Rosslin comes next, in 1522, with a theory about egg-yolk and bread-mash. But these men speak of these substitutes as applicable only in case of extreme need, and there is nothing to suggest that the practice of artificial feeding was common.
At all events, it is safe to say that the vast expansion of artificial feeding, as we know it to-day, is something quite recent and new; and, since there appears to be no doubt that, qualitatively, human milk is quite inimitable, it is impossible to calculate the damage which the latest development of “Progress” may ultimately do to the spirits and bodies of civilized men.
CHAPTER III
Woman’s Future
People ultimately become the image of their values. Discover their ruling values, and their future is foretold.