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.
-----
Footnote 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.”
Footnote 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.
I
In a New York kindergarten one winter’s morning a frail, dark-eyed girl
stood by the radiator warming her tiny blue and benumbed hands. She was
poorly and scantily clad, and her wan, pinched face was unutterably sad
with the sadness that shadows the children of poverty and comes from
cares which only maturer years should know. When she had warmed her
little hands back to life again, the child looked wistfully up into the
teacher’s face and asked:—
“Teacher, do you love God?”
“Why, yes, dearie, of course I love God,” answered the wondering
teacher.
“Well, I don’t—I hate Him!” was the fierce rejoinder. “He makes the wind
blow, and I haven’t any warm clothes—He makes it snow, and my shoes have
holes in them—He makes it cold, and we haven’t any fire at home—He makes
us hungry, and mamma hadn’t any bread for our breakfast—Oh, I hate
Him!”[41]
This story, widely published in the newspapers two or three years ago
and vouched for by the teacher, is remarkable no less for its graphic
description of the thing called poverty than for the child’s passionate
revolt against the supposed author of her misery. Poor, scanty clothing,
cheerless homes, hunger day by day,—these are the main characteristics
of that heritage of poverty to which so many thousands of children are
born. Tens of thousands of baby lives are extinguished by its blasts
every year as though they were so many candles swept by angry winds. But
their fate is far more merciful and enviable than the fate of those who
survive.
For the children who survive the struggle with poverty in their infant
years, and those who do not encounter that struggle until they have
reached school age, not only feel the anguish and shame which comes with
developed consciousness, but society imposes upon them the added burden
of mental effort. Regarding education as the only safe anchorage for a
Democracy, we make it compulsory and boast that it is one of the
fundamental principles of our economy that every child shall be given a
certain amount of elementary instruction. This is our safeguard against
those evils which other generations regarded as being inherent in
popular, representative government. The modern public school, with its
splendid equipment devised to promote the mental and physical
development of our future citizens, is based upon motives and instincts
of self-preservation as distinct and clearly defined as those underlying
our systems of naval and military defences against armed invasion, or
the systems of public sanitation and hygiene through which we seek to
protect ourselves from devastating plagues within.
The past fifty or sixty years have been attended with a wonderful
development of the science of education, as remarkable and important in
its way as anything of which we may boast. We are proud, and justly so,
of the admirable machinery of instruction which we have created, the
fine buildings, laboratories, curricula, highly trained teachers, and so
on, but there is a growing conviction that all this represents only so
much mechanical, rather than human, progress. We have created a vast
network of means, there is no lack of equipment, but we have largely
neglected the human and most important factor, the child.[42] The
futility of expecting efficient education when the teacher is
handicapped by poor and inadequate means is generally recognized, but
not so as yet the futility of expecting it when the teacher has poor
material to work upon in the form of chronically underfed children, too
weak in mind and body to do the work required of them. We are forever
seeking the explanation of the large percentage of educational failures
in the machinery of instruction rather than in the human material, the
children themselves.
The nervous, irritable, half-ill children to be found in such large
numbers in our public schools represent poor material. They are largely
drawn from the homes of poverty, and constitute an overwhelming majority
of those children for whom we have found it necessary to make special
provision,—the backward, dull pupils found year after year in the same
grades with much younger children. In a measure the relation of a
child’s educability to its physical health and comfort has been
recognized by the correlation of physical and mental exercises in most
up-to-date schools, but its larger social and economic significance has
been almost wholly ignored. And yet it is quite certain that poverty
exercises the same retarding influences upon the physical training as
upon mental education. There are certain conditions precedent to
successful education, whether physical or mental. Chief of these are a
reasonable amount of good, nourishing food and a healthy home. Deprived
of these, physical or mental development must necessarily be hindered.
And poverty means just that to the child. It denies its victim these
very necessities with the inevitable result, physical and mental
weakness and inefficiency.
[Illustration:
A “LUNG BLOCK” CHILD IN A TRAGICALLY SUGGESTIVE POSITION
]