The incapacity of a mother to nourish the babe she has borne should be known for a mark of degeneracy—sign, too, that she was unfitted to have borne a child, because deficient in the vital reserve requisite to carry her maternal function to its normal biological and psychological conclusion. Just as a statesman or a general would be held unfitted for his function, if he should lack the physical and mental enterprise to complete his national undertakings.
That for the nine months preceding its birth the infant obtains its nourishment directly from its mother's blood, and for nine months after birth it obtains this, normally, from her milk—her digestive processes having so assimilated the originally brute and vegetable proteids of her food that these are now human proteids, and are ready, therefore, to be built into the infant's body with the least possible tax upon its own assimilative powers—proves a number of important facts.
First: that an infant's digestive powers remain, normally, for nine months after birth, in a more or less embryonic state; slowly and gradually developing capacity to convert the products of the brute and vegetable kingdoms into forms suitable for building into its human organisation. (Just as we see the digestive organs of the child progressively developing power to assimilate an adult dietary.)
Secondly: that the infant's digestion remains thus undeveloped obviously in order that as little as possible of its vital power may be expended in the complex processes of assimilation, all available vital-power being urgently required for its exhaustingly rapid brain- and body-building.
Thirdly: that where an artificial diet forces precocious development upon the infant-digestion—since all precocity is degeneracy, all the organs concerned in digestion will be, necessarily, more or less structurally defective and functionally inefficient; as a consequence of not having been permitted time and rest to develop slowly and stably over the normal allotted period. (Proof is supplied by the premature development of teeth, which occurs in artificially-fed babies some months before dentition is normally due. And these teeth and those that succeed them are of such perishable structure that present-day children need perpetual dental repairs.)
Fourthly: that such misapplication of vital resources for the premature development and abnormal functions of precocious digestive organs entails inevitably corresponding loss of vital power for general development.
Fifthly—and by no means lastly, but perhaps most important of all: that since the infant-digestion is quite incapable of properly converting brute and vegetable-proteids into human proteid, infants artificially fed must necessarily build into their brains and bodies lower-grade proteids—and proteids so imperfectly assimilated as to be something less than human, and, accordingly, more or less brute or vegetable still in their inherences. And since all living cells and tissues reproduce upon the plan of the parent-cells and tissues they were derived from, it is clear that the abnormal cells and tissues constructed of these half-brute, or half-vegetable proteids must be abnormal; unstable and degenerate, and prone to lapse readily to still further degrees of deterioration and disease.
Hence a source of our neurotic, neurasthenic, adenoid-afflicted, mentally-defective and otherwise diseased children. Hence too the increasing criminality—which is animality, of course—that characterises a considerable proportion of the rising generation.
Each further generation artificially fed in infancy can but deviate still further from the Human Normal, becoming ever less human; brain and body-cells reproducing themselves, throughout life, on the plan of their infant-construction of half-brute or half-vegetable proteids. One sees the ox in the dull, soulless eyes, in the bovine flesh, the stolid faces, and in the crude animal natures of many modern little ones, to whom calf-diet was fed before they had developed the digestive power of transforming this into substance highly vitalised enough for human brain and body-building. And the less their systems have rebelled against and have rejected, but, on the contrary, have conformed to and have thriven upon such brute-diet, the cruder are their organisations. Of this order are the insensate child-monsters who win prizes at Baby-shows.
To one who realises that, of all the powers of Woman, the ability to nurse her babe is second in importance only to her first and vital function of producing it, the cry and clamour and impassioned fallacy that have swirled around the trivial detail of her Suffrage-disabilities show grotesque beside the human tragedy of her increasing biological disability and her increasing psychical aversion to fulfil this indispensable and sacred mother-office. To despise which, as being a function woman possesses in common with the humbler creatures, is as narrow-sighted as it would be to scorn the genius of Shakespeare because both dog and pig, poor things! possess brains. Moreover, in forfeiting this maternal faculty, woman reverts to the mode of those crude rudimentary species below the Mammalia.