Infant mortality was high, even among royalty at the end of the eighteenth century and not one of George IIl's large family of sons was able to raise a family. Victoria was the.only (legitimate) child who survived at a time when the country was most anxious about the dynasty.
Present day knowledge would have saved a lot of this. Though milk for instance, was naturally used for young children, neither the cows nor the milk after milking were hygienically treated. A little dirt did not matter to our forebears; it is feared that there were dairymen, even in the Royal dairies, who were not over particular, and it is also feared that the children paid the price.
Nowadays cleanliness, a super clean-lines, we might say, is the most rigid rule in all up-to-date dairies and it affords real pleasure to visit one of our local modern dairies. There are people in Shanghai, even today, who remember the time when the local milkman brought round his cow from door to door, and one small girl revealed how she had watched with interest the ingenious way in which the cow-man had, with the aid of a rubber ball and a tube up his sleeve, contrived to introduce water into the family milk-jug. True, the child survived to tell the tale and is flourishing to this day, but many did not survive such unclean practices.
Modern Shanghai mothers need to be devoutly thankful that there has been such a vast improvement in the local trade, and surely the modern child shows, in looks and vigour, the, results of care taken on its behalf.
HE
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.