I
The burden and blight of poverty fall most heavily upon the child. No more responsible for its poverty than for its birth, the helplessness and innocence of the victim add infinite horror to its suffering, for the centuries have not made tolerable the idea that the weakness or wrongdoing of its parents or others should be expiated by the suffering of the child. Poverty, the poverty of civilized man, which is everywhere coexistent with unbounded wealth and luxury, is always ugly, repellent, and terrible either to see or to experience; but when it assails the cradle it assumes its most hideous form. Underfed, or badly fed, neglected, badly housed, and improperly clad, the child of poverty is terribly handicapped at the very start; it has not an even chance to begin life with. While still in its cradle a yoke is laid upon its after years, and it is doomed either to die in infancy, or, worse still, to live and grow up puny, weak, both in body and in mind, inefficient and unfitted for the battle of life. And it is the consciousness of this, the knowledge that poverty in childhood blights the whole of life, which makes it the most appalling of all the phases of the poverty problem.
Biologically, the first years of life are supremely important. They are the foundation years; and just as the stability of a building must depend largely upon the skill and care with which its foundations are laid, so life and character depend in large measure upon the years of childhood and the care bestowed upon them. For millions of children the whole of life is conditioned by the first few years. The period of infancy is a time of extreme plasticity. Proper care and nutrition at this period of life are of vital importance, for the evils arising from neglect, insufficient food, or food that is unsuitable, can never be wholly remedied. “The problem of the child is the problem of the race,”[[1]] and more and more emphatically science declares that almost all the problems of physical, mental, and moral degeneracy originate with the child. The physician traces the weakness and disease of the adult to defective nutrition in early childhood; the penologist traces moral perversion to the same cause; the pedagogue finds the same explanation for his failures. Thanks to the many notable investigations made in recent years, especially in European countries, sociological science is being revolutionized. Hitherto we have not studied the great and pressing problems of pauperism and criminology from the child-end; we have concerned ourselves almost entirely with results while ignoring causes. The new spirit aims at prevention.
To the child as to the adult the principal evils of poverty are material ones,—lack of nourishing food, of suitable clothing, and of healthy home surroundings. These are the fundamental evils from which all others arise. The younger children are spared the anxiety, shame, and despair felt by their parents and by their older brothers and sisters, but they suffer terribly from neglect when, as so often happens, their mothers are forced to abandon the most important functions of motherhood to become wage-earners. The cry of a child for food which its mother is powerless to give it is the most awful cry the ages have known. Even the sound of battle, the mingled shrieks of wounded man and beast, and the roar of guns, cannot vie with it in horror. Yet that cry goes up incessantly: in the world’s richest cities the child’s hunger-cry rises above the din of the mart. Fortunate indeed is the child whose lips have never uttered that cry, who has never gone breakfastless to play or supperless to bed. For periods of destitution come sooner or later to a majority of the proletarian class. Practically all the unskilled laborers and hundreds of thousands engaged in the skilled trades are so entirely dependent upon their weekly wages, that a month’s sickness or unemployment brings them to hunger and temporary dependence. Not long ago, in the course of an address before the members of a labor union, I asked all those present who had ever had to go hungry, or to see their children hungry, as a result of sickness, accident, or unemployment to raise their hands. No less than one hundred and eighty-four hands were raised out of a total attendance of two hundred and nineteen present, yet these were all skilled workers protected in a measure by their organization.
A GROUP OF “LUNG BLOCK” CHILDREN
The white symbol of a child’s death hangs on a door in the background.
It is not, however, the occasional hunger, the loss of a few meals now and then in such periods of distress, that is of most importance; it is the chronic underfeeding day after day, month after month, year after year. Even where lack of all food is rarely or never experienced, there is often chronic underfeeding. There may be food sufficient as to quantity, but qualitatively poor and almost wholly lacking in nutritive value, and such is the tragic fate of those dependent upon it that they do not even know that they are underfed in the most literal sense of the word. They live and struggle and go down to their graves without realizing the fact of their disinheritance. A plant uprooted and left lying upon the ground withers quickly and dies; planted in dry, lifeless, arid soil it would wither and die, too, less quickly perhaps but as surely. It dies when there is no soil about its roots and it dies when there is soil in abundance, but no nourishing qualities in the soil. As the plant is, so is the life of a child; where there is no food, starvation is swift, mercifully swift, and complete; when there is only poor food lacking in nutritive qualities starvation is partial, slower, and less merciful. The thousands of rickety infants to be seen in all our large cities and towns, the anæmic, languid-looking children one sees everywhere in working-class districts, and the striking contrast presented by the appearance of the children of the well-to-do bear eloquent witness to the widespread prevalence of underfeeding.
Poverty and Death are grim companions. Wherever there is much poverty the death-rate is high and rises higher with every rise of the tide of want and misery. In London, Bethnal Green’s death-rate is nearly double that of Belgravia;[[2]] in Paris, the poverty-stricken district of Ménilmontant has a death-rate twice as high as that of the Elysée;[[3]] in Chicago, the death-rate varies from about twelve per thousand in the wards where the well-to-do reside to thirty-seven per thousand in the tenement wards.[[4]] The ill-developed bodies of the poor, underfed and overburdened with toil, have not the powers of resistance to disease possessed by the bodies of the more fortunate. As fire rages most fiercely and with greatest devastation among the ill-built, crowded tenements, so do the fierce flames of disease consume most readily the ill-built, fragile bodies which the tenements shelter. As we ascend the social scale the span of life lengthens and the death-rate gradually diminishes, the death-rate of the poorest class of workers being three and a half times as great as that of the well-to-do. It is estimated that among 10,000,000 persons of the latter class the annual deaths do not number more than 100,000, among the best paid of the working-class the number is not less than 150,000, while among the poorest workers the number is at least 350,000.[[5]] The following diagram illustrates these figures clearly and needs no further comment:—
DIAGRAM
Showing Relative Death-rates per 100,000 Persons in Different Classes.
This difference in the death-rates of the various social classes is even more strongly marked in the case of infants. Mortality in the first year of life differs enormously according to the circumstances of the parents and the amount of intelligent care bestowed upon the infants. In Boston’s “Back Bay” district the death-rate at all ages last year was 13.45 per thousand as compared with 18.45 in the Thirteenth Ward, which is a typical working-class district, and of the total number of deaths the percentage under one year was 9.44 in the former as against 25.21 in the latter. Wolf, in his classic studies based upon the vital statistics of Erfurt for a period of twenty years, found that for every 1000 children born in working-class families 505 died in the first year; among the middle classes 173, and among the higher classes only 89. Of every 1000 illegitimate children registered—almost entirely of the poorer classes—352 died before the end of the first year.[[6]] Dr. Charles R. Drysdale, Senior Physician of the Metropolitan Free Hospital, London, declared some years ago that the death-rate of infants among the rich was not more than 8 per cent, while among the very poor it was often as high as 40 per cent.[[7]] Dr. Playfair says that 18 per cent of the children of the upper classes, 36 per cent of the tradesman class, and 55 per cent of those of the working-class die under the age of five years.[[8]]
And yet the experts say that the baby of the tenement is born physically equal to the baby of the mansion.[[9]] For countless years men have sung of the Democracy of Death, but it is only recently that science has brought us the more inspiring message of the Democracy of Birth. It is not only in the tomb that we are equal, where there is neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, but also in the womb of our mothers. At birth class distinctions are unknown. For long the hope-crushing thought of prenatal hunger, the thought that the mother’s hunger was shared by the unborn child, and that poverty began its blighting work on the child even before its birth, held us in its thrall. The thought that past generations have innocently conspired against the well-being of the child of to-day, and that this generation in its turn conspires against the child of the future, is surcharged with the pessimism which mocks every ideal and stifles every hope born in the soul. Nothing more horrible ever cast its shadow over the hearts of those who would labor for the world’s redemption from poverty than this spectre of prenatal privation and inherited debility. But science comes to dispel the gloom and bid us hope. Over and over again it was stated before the Interdepartmental Committee by the leading obstetrical authorities of the English medical profession that the proportion of children born healthy and strong is not greater among the rich than among the poor.[[10]] The differences appear after birth. Wise, patient Mother Nature provides with each succeeding generation opportunity to overcome the evils of ages of ignorance and wrong, with each generation the world starts afresh and unhampered, physically, at least, by the dead past.
“The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return.”
And herein lies the greatest hope of the race; we are not handicapped from the start; we can begin with the child of to-day to make certain a brighter and nobler to-morrow as though there had never been a yesterday of woe and wrong.[[B]]