SHOWING RELATIVE DEATH-RATES PER 100,000 PERSONS IN DIFFERENT CLASSES.
]
This difference in the death-rates of the various social classes is even
more strongly marked in the case of infants. Mortality in the first year
of life differs enormously according to the circumstances of the parents
and the amount of intelligent care bestowed upon the infants. In
Boston’s “Back Bay” district the death-rate at all ages last year was
13.45 per thousand as compared with 18.45 in the Thirteenth Ward, which
is a typical working-class district, and of the total number of deaths
the percentage under one year was 9.44 in the former as against 25.21 in
the latter. Wolf, in his classic studies based upon the vital statistics
of Erfurt for a period of twenty years, found that for every 1000
children born in working-class families 505 died in the first year;
among the middle classes 173, and among the higher classes only 89. Of
every 1000 illegitimate children registered—almost entirely of the
poorer classes—352 died before the end of the first year.[6] Dr. Charles
R. Drysdale, Senior Physician of the Metropolitan Free Hospital, London,
declared some years ago that the death-rate of infants among the rich
was not more than 8 per cent, while among the very poor it was often as
high as 40 per cent.[7] Dr. Playfair says that 18 per cent of the
children of the upper classes, 36 per cent of the tradesman class, and
55 per cent of those of the working-class die under the age of five
years.[8]
And yet the experts say that the baby of the tenement is born physically
equal to the baby of the mansion.[9] For countless years men have sung
of the Democracy of Death, but it is only recently that science has
brought us the more inspiring message of the Democracy of Birth. It is
not only in the tomb that we are equal, where there is neither rich nor
poor, bond nor free, but also in the womb of our mothers. At birth class
distinctions are unknown. For long the hope-crushing thought of prenatal
hunger, the thought that the mother’s hunger was shared by the unborn
child, and that poverty began its blighting work on the child even
before its birth, held us in its thrall. The thought that past
generations have innocently conspired against the well-being of the
child of to-day, and that this generation in its turn conspires against
the child of the future, is surcharged with the pessimism which mocks
every ideal and stifles every hope born in the soul. Nothing more
horrible ever cast its shadow over the hearts of those who would labor
for the world’s redemption from poverty than this spectre of prenatal
privation and inherited debility. But science comes to dispel the gloom
and bid us hope. Over and over again it was stated before the
Interdepartmental Committee by the leading obstetrical authorities of
the English medical profession that the proportion of children born
healthy and strong is not greater among the rich than among the
poor.[10] The differences appear after birth. Wise, patient Mother
Nature provides with each succeeding generation opportunity to overcome
the evils of ages of ignorance and wrong, with each generation the world
starts afresh and unhampered, physically, at least, by the dead past.
“The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return.”
And herein lies the greatest hope of the race; we are not handicapped
from the start; we can begin with the child of to-day to make certain a
brighter and nobler to-morrow as though there had never been a yesterday
of woe and wrong.[B]