It is a strange fact of social psychology that people in the mass, whether nations or smaller communities, or crowds, have much less feeling and conscience than the same people have as individuals. People whose souls would cry out against such conditions as we have described coming under their notice in a specific case, en masse are unmoved. As individuals we fully recognize that charity can never take the place of justice, but collectively, as citizens, we are prone to solace ourselves with the thought that charity, organized and unorganized, somehow meets the problem, and we blind ourselves to the contrary evidences which everywhere confront us. But it is only too true that charity—“that damnably cold thing called charity”—fails utterly to meet the problem of poverty in general and childhood’s poverty in particular. Nothing could be more pathetic than the method employed by so many charitable persons and societies of attempting to solve the latter problem by finding employment for the mother, as if that were not the worst phase of all from any sane view of the child’s interest. Charity degrades and demoralizes, and there is little or no compensating effective help. In the vast majority of cases it fails to reach the suffering in time to save them from becoming chronic dependents. More and more the heart and brain of the world are coming to a recognition of the fact that charity, however well organized, cannot solve the problems which the gigantic and blind forces inhering in the laws of social development have called into being.

While the causes of poverty remain active in the forces which govern their lives, it is impossible to reclaim the victims. Were nothing but charity possible, consideration of this and other phases of our growing social misery might well plunge us into the deepest and blackest pessimism. But surely we may see in those experiments in the work of social reconstruction, which wise and enlightened municipalities have undertaken, a widening sense of social responsibility and the rays of the hope-light for which men have waited through the years. Such social efforts as the municipal milk depots of Europe and this country, based upon the Gouttes de Lait of France;[[39]] the provision of free, well-regulated crèches[[40]] and the extension of free medical service at the public cost, have been attended with important beneficial results and point the way to further efforts in the same direction. Experience points clearly to the need of some provision to enable the mother to remain with her infant child instead of leaving it to the care of others while she joins the great machine, and becomes part of it, in the interests of that world-supremacy in commerce and industry which is our boast and dream, and for which we are paying too terrible a price.

It is, of course, true that even these measures will not banish poverty from the world. They can only palliate the evils, not eradicate them. Eradication can only be accomplished by greater, foundational changes which will make it possible for every child to flourish as befits the inheritors of the ages of strife and suffering which the world is slowly coming to regard as so many experiences and lessons in the art of life. Between the present wrong and that ideal there must come golden years of opportunity for enlightened social statesmanship consecrated to the rescue of the nation’s children from the curse and thrall of cruel and relentless poverty, which otherwise must be bequeathed again to the generations yet unborn to damn their lives. In the child’s cry of to-day wisdom will hear the nation of to-morrow pleading that it may be saved from the blight and decay of a poverty which our vast resources and treasuries of wealth declare to be as needless as it is shameful and wrong.

[B]. For a contrary view of this question, see Dr. Paton’s article on “The Influence of Diet in Pregnancy on the Weight of the Offspring,” Lancet, July 4, 1903; and Dr. Ballantyne’s “Antenatal Pathology and Hygiene.”

[C]. Drs. Baillestre and Gillette have estimated that three-fourths of the infantile death-rate of France are due to avoidable causes. Five years of ignorance, they say, has cost France 220,000 lives—equal to the loss of an army corps of 45,000 men annually.—Lancet, February 2, 1901.

II
THE SCHOOL CHILD

“‘It is good when it happens,’ say the children,

‘That we die before our time.’”

—Mrs. Browning.