VI
As in all human problems, ignorance plays an important rôle in this great problem of childhood’s suffering and misery. The tragedy of the infant’s position is its helplessness; not only must it suffer on account of the misfortunes of its parents, but it must suffer from their vices and from their ignorance as well. Nurses, sick visitors, dispensary doctors, and those in charge of babies’ hospitals tell pitiful stories of almost incredible ignorance of which babies are the victims. A child was given cabbage by its mother when it was three weeks old; another, seven weeks old, was fed for several days in succession on sausage and bread with pickles! Both died of gastritis, victims of ignorance. In another New York tenement home a baby less than nine weeks old was fed on sardines with vinegar and bread by its mother. Even more pathetic is the case of the baby, barely six weeks old, found by a district nurse in Boston in the family clothes-basket which formed its cradle, sucking a long strip of salt, greasy bacon and with a bottle containing beer by its side. Though rescued from immediate death, this child will probably never recover wholly from the severe intestinal disorder induced by the ignorance of its mother. Yet, after all, it is doubtful whether the beer and bacon were worse for it than many of the patent “infant foods” of the cheaper kinds commonly given in good faith to the children of the poor. If medical opinion goes for anything, many of these “foods” are little better than slow poisons.[[22]] Tennyson’s awful charge is still true, that:—
“The spirit of murder works in the very means of life.”
Nor is the work of this spirit of murder confined to the concoction of “patent foods” which are in reality patent poisons. The adulteration of milk with formaldehyde and other base adulterants is responsible for a great deal of infant mortality, and its ravages are chiefly confined to the poor. It is little short of alarming that in New York City, out of 3970 samples of milk taken from dealers for analysis during 1902, no less than 2095, or 52.77 per cent, should have been found to be adulterated.[[23]] Mr. Nathan Straus, the philanthropist whose Pasteurized milk depots have saved many thousands of baby lives during the past twelve years, has not hesitated to call this adulteration by its proper name, child-murder. He says:—
“If I should hire Madison Square Garden and announce that at eight o’clock on a certain evening I would publicly strangle a child, what excitement there would be!
“If I walked out into the ring to carry out my threat, a thousand men would stop me and kill me—and everybody would applaud them for doing so.
“But every day children are actually murdered by neglect or by poisonous milk. The murders are as real as the murder would be if I should choke a child to death before the eyes of a crowd.
“It is hard to interest the people in what they don’t see.”[[24]]
Ignorance is indeed a grave and important phase of the problem, and the most difficult of all to deal with. Education is the remedy, of course, but how shall we accomplish it? It is not easy to educate after the natural days of education are passed. Mrs. Havelock Ellis has advocated “a noviciate for marriage,” a period of probation and of preparation and equipment for marriage and maternity.[[25]] But such a proposal is too far removed from the sphere of practicality to have more than an academic interest at present. Simply worded letters to mothers upon the care and feeding of their infants, supplemented by personal visits from well-trained women visitors, would help, as similar methods have helped, in the campaign against tuberculosis. Many foreign municipalities have adopted this plan, notably Huddersfield, England, and several American cities have followed their example with marked success. There should be no great difficulty about its adoption generally. One great obstacle to be overcome is the resentment of the mothers whom it is most necessary to reach, as many of those engaged in philanthropic work know all too well. One poor woman, whose little child was ailing, became very irate when a lady visitor ventured to offer her some advice concerning the child’s clothing and food, and soundly berated her would-be adviser. “You talk to me about how to look after my baby!” she cried. “Why, I guess I know more about it than you do. I’ve buried nine already!” It is not the naïve humor of the poor woman’s wrath that is most significant, but the grim, tragic pathos back of it. Those four words, “I’ve buried nine already!” tell more eloquently than could a hundred learned essays or polished orations the vastness of civilization’s failure. For, surely, we may not regard it as anything but failure so long as women who have borne eleven children into the world, as had this one, can say, “I’ve buried nine already!”
But circular letters and lady visitors will not solve the problem of maternal ignorance; such methods can only skim the surface of the evil. This ignorance on the part of mothers, of which the babies are victims, is deeply rooted in the soil of those economic conditions which constitute poverty in the broadest sense of the term, though there may be no destitution or absolute want. It is not poverty in the narrow sense of a lack of the material necessities of life, but rather a condition in which these are obtainable only by the concentrated effort of all members of the family able to contribute anything and to the exclusion of all else in life. Young girls who go to work in shops and factories as soon as they are old enough to obtain employment frequently continue working up to within a few days of marriage, and not infrequently return to work for some time after marriage. Especially is this true of girls employed in mills and factories; their male acquaintances are for the most part fellow-workers, and marriages between them are numerous. Where many women are employed men’s wages are, as a consequence, almost invariably low, with the result that after marriage it is as necessary that the woman should work as it was before.
When the years which under more favored conditions would have been spent at home in preparation for the duties of wifehood and motherhood are spent behind the counter, at the bench, or amid the whirl of machinery in the factory, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the knowledge of domestic economy is scant among them, and that so many utterly fail as wives and mothers. Deprived of the opportunities of helping their mothers with the housework and cooking and the care of the younger children, marriage finds them ill-equipped; too often they are slaves to the frying-pan, or to the stores where cooked food may be bought in small quantities. Bad cooking, extravagance, and mismanagement are incidental to our modern industrial conditions.