I
THE BLIGHTING OF THE BABIES
“Oh, room for the lamb in the meadow,
And room for the bird on the tree!
But here, in stern poverty’s shadow,
No room, hapless baby! for thee.”
—E. M. MILNE.
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.
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