Life is so constituted that its most cruel disabilities and evils are borne inevitably by the children in the van of the Great March. These hapless ones it is—soft buds pushing from the Human Tree—that bear the brunt of the evolutionary impulse.
In the main, the very finest children of The Poor succumb. Because the higher the organism, the more complex and delicately-fitted to its vital needs its life-conditions require to be. Briars flourish where rose-trees die. Degenerate children struggle through where better types go under. We are not ready, it is true, for exotic humans. But we need urgently, indeed, all the healthy, intelligent, well-balanced stock we can produce.
A certain uniformity of type is secured by the expedients of Natural Selection; by that continual correction of premature evolutionary unfoldment which results from the checks and prunings of developmental exigencies—in the necessary acclimatisation and adaptation of the young and tender organism to environment. And Nature herself provides all the checks and prunings required, in her tests of teething, of measles, and the other diseases and trials of infancy and childhood.
The respiration-curves and the brain pulse-waves of young infants show serious disturbance as result of sudden loud noises. The consequent nervous jar perturbs both breathing and circulation.
The whole organisation of an infant is so delicate and is so subtly balanced as to require the gentlest possible treatment. One sees on the faces of infants and young children a chronic look of painful expectancy. Their brows are knitted as though to brace their hyper-sensitive systems for the next distressing shock. Women accustomed to hard, laborious work (or sports) lose power to adjust their movements to these delicate needs. And when, unkind and impatient, they fly at the unfortunates and shake or beat or scold them violently, they have no suspicion that for hours afterwards, perhaps for days, the children's nervous systems may be so shattered and disorganised, digestion and assimilative powers so impaired, as to interfere gravely with growth and development. Degrees of "shock," akin to shell-shock, result from such maternal violence and chronic terrorism; occasioning feeble-mindedness, morbid timidity, mental hebetude and, moreover, subconscious impressions, which, later in life, may emerge as obsessions, or as other forms of insanity. Fear is the most shattering and paralysing of the emotions. Yet not only brought up by hand, the majority of our little ones are brought up by violent hand.
All day long and during every moment of it, a thousand delicate processes of growth and unfoldment and of intricate adjustments are going on mysteriously within the shaping brain and body of a child. Subconsciously, these are a continued tax and strain; making him hyper-sensitive, irritable, cross, perhaps, for causes that appear inadequate. A child is like a convalescent, in that he uses up rapidly for growth and development all the nutritive material and vital energy at his disposal. This is true of healthy, well-nurtured children. What then of these child-martyrs of The Poor, who in addition to the strain of growth, are ill-fed, poisoned by unsuitable foods; are sickly, rickety, bronchitic, dyspeptic, syphilitic, phthisical? Nevertheless, all the maternal care these miserables receive are such rough dregs of kindness and of patience as may be left over from the toil of their working-mothers' hard, exhausting days.
It is no less than monstrous that our laws allow the nation's babes and children—to whom are due all the best resources of maternal care and tenderness and duly-trained maternal powers—to be thus martyred. As substitute for the home and for their mothers—which are every child's birthright—more and more, infants and young children are consigned now to Crèches; chill institutions of alien atmosphere, alien surroundings, alien nurses, where, unmothered, they are ciphers among other unmothered alien ciphers. Yet babies and young children are so pathetically constituted that they prefer blows from their mothers to caresses from strangers.
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The life-story written in the faces of the great majority of our Twentieth-Century babes and children is a terrible one, in its revelation of tortured helplessness, hopeless resignation, unnatural fortitude, blank despair. See them sunk, limp and dejected, in their prams or go-carts, eyes staring forward on the dreary waste their lives are; limbs dangling, like those of toys with broken springs.
In cities, mothers, ignorant of the shock and injury which noise and turmoil inflict upon these sensitive brains and nerves, wheel them amid jostling crowds—in order that they themselves may enjoy the excitements of the shops. At the low level of their prams, they breathe air vitiated by the passers-by; are in the exhausting whirl and press of swirling nerve-currents. In their poor ill-made carriages, they are jerked abruptly, now up, now down, at every kerb; with no more care or tenderness than though they were baskets of clothes. They sit patient, leaden, apathetic; cruelly strapped for hours together in one position; neither pulse of health nor spirit in them.