The white symbol of a child’s death hangs on a door in the background.
]
It is not, however, the occasional hunger, the loss of a few meals now
and then in such periods of distress, that is of most importance; it is
the chronic underfeeding day after day, month after month, year after
year. Even where lack of all food is rarely or never experienced, there
is often chronic underfeeding. There may be food sufficient as to
quantity, but qualitatively poor and almost wholly lacking in nutritive
value, and such is the tragic fate of those dependent upon it that they
do not even know that they are underfed in the most literal sense of the
word. They live and struggle and go down to their graves without
realizing the fact of their disinheritance. A plant uprooted and left
lying upon the ground withers quickly and dies; planted in dry,
lifeless, arid soil it would wither and die, too, less quickly perhaps
but as surely. It dies when there is no soil about its roots and it dies
when there is soil in abundance, but no nourishing qualities in the
soil. As the plant is, so is the life of a child; where there is no
food, starvation is swift, mercifully swift, and complete; when there is
only poor food lacking in nutritive qualities starvation is partial,
slower, and less merciful. The thousands of rickety infants to be seen
in all our large cities and towns, the anæmic, languid-looking children
one sees everywhere in working-class districts, and the striking
contrast presented by the appearance of the children of the well-to-do
bear eloquent witness to the widespread prevalence of underfeeding.
Poverty and Death are grim companions. Wherever there is much poverty
the death-rate is high and rises higher with every rise of the tide of
want and misery. In London, Bethnal Green’s death-rate is nearly double
that of Belgravia;[2] in Paris, the poverty-stricken district of
Ménilmontant has a death-rate twice as high as that of the Elysée;[3] in
Chicago, the death-rate varies from about twelve per thousand in the
wards where the well-to-do reside to thirty-seven per thousand in the
tenement wards.[4] The ill-developed bodies of the poor, underfed and
overburdened with toil, have not the powers of resistance to disease
possessed by the bodies of the more fortunate. As fire rages most
fiercely and with greatest devastation among the ill-built, crowded
tenements, so do the fierce flames of disease consume most readily the
ill-built, fragile bodies which the tenements shelter. As we ascend the
social scale the span of life lengthens and the death-rate gradually
diminishes, the death-rate of the poorest class of workers being three
and a half times as great as that of the well-to-do. It is estimated
that among 10,000,000 persons of the latter class the annual deaths do
not number more than 100,000, among the best paid of the working-class
the number is not less than 150,000, while among the poorest workers the
number is at least 350,000.[5] The following diagram illustrates these
figures clearly and needs no further comment:—
[Illustration: