What if our Government did nothing to end a war that was killing 600,000 Americans each year? What if a few contractors who were making millions out of the war controlled elections, administrations and the courts and would not let the government end the war?
What difference does it make whether foreign foes and army contractors kill these millions, or whether domestic dividend-takers and their governments kill them? Dead men not only “tell no tales,” but they have no preferences. It is as bad to be dead from one cause as from another.
“During the next ten years,” said Professor Norton, “more than 6,000,000 infants less than two years old will end their little spans of life, while mothers sit by and watch in utter helplessness. And yet this number could probably be decreased by as much as half. But nothing is done.”
Dr. Cressey L. Wilbur, Chief Statistician for Vital Statistics for the Federal Census Bureau, says that at least 100,000 and perhaps 200,000 children less than five years old die in this country every year from preventable causes.
Our national government freights the mails with circulars telling how to cure hog-cholera and kill the insects that prey on fruit trees; but in all the years since the Revolutionary War, it has never sent a circular to a mother telling her how to keep her baby alive. The state and the municipal governments have done something, but they have usually stopped when they reached the big money bags. Not a state or a city has made it impossible for a baby to be given bad milk. Not a state or a city has rid itself of unsanitary habitations. Not a state or a city has condemned all the workshops in which men and women work at the peril of their lives. Not a state or a city has even enforced its own factory-inspection laws.
If the men whom big business has put in office were even intelligently interested in public health, probably 50,000 babies could be saved each year without tearing down a rookery or providing a single better house. A little intelligent effort and a few thousand dollars would suffice.
Dr. Hutchinson tells what a little intelligent effort and a few dollars did for the babies of the small English city of Huddersfield. A few years ago a physician was elected mayor. One of his first acts was to announce that he would give a prize of ten shillings to the mother of every child born during the mayor’s administration, provided the babies were brought to his office in perfect health, on the first anniversary of their birth. The only other stipulation was that no mother should be eligible to a prize who did not immediately report to the mayor the birth of her infant.
Though the prize was small, there was no lack of mothers who were willing to be takers. The doctor-mayor established what amounted to a correspondence school for mothers, and, at the birth of each child, began to send circulars telling how to take care of the baby; what to feed it and what not to feed it; what to do if the baby appeared so-and-so—and so on. Moreover, he kept a city physician on the circuit to look in at each home as often as possible, to see how the babies appeared and give the mothers further advice.
That’s all there is to this story—except that he brought down the death-rate for babies from 130 to 55; saved 75 babies each year to each thousand born. More than that he helped the babies who would have lived anyway. Good care, says the doctor, will increase the strength of strong babies from 15 to 25 per cent.
Any American government could do as much. By condemning unsanitary homes any American government could do more. All that is necessary is the desire—and the permission of those who control the governments. The people that cast the ballots are willing to give the permission, but the ballots they cast perpetuate the conditions against which they complain. Otherwise, there would be no death-trap houses; nor impure food; nor extortionate food-prices; nor unsanitary workplaces. And somebody would go to jail if an ice trust, desiring to cripple competitors who might cut prices, should send ships up a river to destroy the ice. It was brought out in court that the New York Ice Trust did that. The ice trust was convicted under the State anti-trust law. But nobody is in jail. And ice is still selling at a price that kills the children of the poor.