INFANTICIDE IN AMERICA.

Westport Times, Volume V, Issue 819, 1 June 1871, Page 3

INFANTICIDE IN AMERICA.

Our (" Australasian") statement with respect to the prevalence of infanticide in America has been impugned, and we are charged with having perpetrated a gross libel on the women of the United States. Our authorities are Bishop Coxe, of the State of New York, the Moderator and members of the Presbyterian Assembly at New York, the Rev. John Todd, Dr A. K. Gardner, one of the professors of the New York Medical College ; the " New York Tribune," the advertising columns of the Boston and New Ydrk papers, and the reports of speeches delivered at public meetings in both these cities and elsewhere. It is only a few months ago that a popular clergyman in Brooklyn remarked to his congregation, " Why send missionaries to India when child

murder is here of daily, almost hourly occurrence ?" " Infanticide," writes D»- Gardner, "is the great, glaring, and fearfully prevalent sin of New York." " The frequency of such murders can bo no longer concealed,'* says the Presbvterian Assembly. " The world itself is beginning to be terrified by the practical results of the sacrifices to Moloch which defile our land," sayß Bishop Coxe. The evil is not peculiar to New York. Jt is just as prevalent in the " pious and virtuous" New England States. At a public meeting of the working women of Boston, hold on the 20th May, 1809, to proclaim, inter alia, that white women and girls, who to-day give a long and hard day's work for 25 cents in currency (about 10|d) are quite as much the object of Christian and benevolent sympathy as were the Negro slave women of the ' Southern rice swamps, Mrs Daniels affirmed—and the declaration was assented to by all present—that the American race was dying out. " Children," said she, are the reserve power of a nation, and to-day, in many an American house, the children are being murdered ; yes, murdered in cold blood. "Why, in no home will you find more than one or two children. It is the foreigners who come here that are obliged to bear the children for your nation. Until children are allowed to live, instead of being kicked out of the world—until this evil of your nation is remedied, will it sink deeper and still deeper in degradation and misery." "With respect to the increase of population in the United States by immigration, the "New York Tribune," some months ago published a series of tabular calculations, sbowing that the increment of inhabitants from that source since 1790 was equivalent to the aggregate population of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, lowa, Wisconsin, Minn sota, Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Nevada, California, and Oregon, with the territories of Utah, Colorado, Dakotah, New Mexico, and Washington. When the civil war broke out, the population of the nonseceding states and territories numbered 22,000,000, and of this number 9,000,000 were due to immigration.