Doctor Devine has well said that "the only satisfactory method of getting babies safely through the first years of life is the strictly individualistic plan of attention to each one by its own mother." The proof of this is in the death-rate of infants in foundling asylums and in other forms of communal care even where scientific knowledge has been invoked and humane feeling exercised.

To keep babies alive and well is a prerequisite to all later development, and happiness seems to be a necessary foundation for such preservation of their life and health.
So far in human experience babies have declined with one accord to be happy unless some one person was constantly devoted to their welfare.
That person may be a "hired expert," it is true, but the successful nurse must have the mother-feeling.

Moreover, it is now agreed that the best physical stamina is secured by mothers breast-feeding their own babies, and all manner of incentives, even to state subsidies, are being used to lead women to this personal office.
If mothers thus nurse their babies they must come close to them in affectional contact, and it is through affectional contact more than in any other way that babies seem to thrive.

No one can claim that ability to care for and bring up children "comes by nature." The affectional tie does, however, give an added earnestness to the desire to learn how to minister wisely and well to the needs of the child.
That same affectional tie on the part of the mother is shown in a return of affection from the child.

Such personal ministrations of the mother to the child have also a great effect in forming the whole character in later life.