Chapter V: Blossoms and Babies 263 (2)

In Brooklyn, in a rear tenement in the heart of that huge labyrinth of bricks and mortar near the Great Bridge, such a mother lives and struggles against poverty and the Great White Plague. She is an American, born of American parents, and her husband is also native-born but of Scotch parentage. He is a laborer and when at work earns $1.75 per day, but partly owing to frequently recurring sickness and partly also to the difficulty of obtaining employment, it is doubtful whether his wages average $6 a week the year through. Of six children born only two are living, their ages being seven years and two-and-a-half years respectively. Both are rickety and weak and stunted in appearance. As she sat upon her bed sewing, only pausing to cough when the plague seemed to choke her, she told her story: “It’s awful,” she said, “but I must work else we shall get nothing to eat and be turned into the street besides. I have no time for anything but work. I must work, work, work, and work. Often we go to our beds as we left them when I haven’t time or strength to shake them up, and Joe, my husband, is too tired or sick to do it. Cooking? Oh, I cook nothing, for I haven’t time; I must work. I send the little girl out to the store across the way and she gets what she can,—crackers, cake, cheese, anything she can get—and I’m thankful if I can only make some fresh tea.” Neither of this woman’s two little children has ever known the experience of being decently fed, and their weak, rickety bodies tell the results. From a bare account of their diet it might be inferred that the mother must be ignorant or neglectful, but she is, on the contrary, a most intelligent woman and devoted to her children. Under better conditions she would perhaps have been a model housewife and mother, but it is not within the possibilities of her toil-worn, hunger-wasted body to be these and at the same time a wage-earner. So, without attempting to minimize the part which ignorance plays, it is well to emphasize the fact, so often lost sight of and forgotten, that what appears to be ignorance or neglect is very frequently only poverty in one of its many disguises.

VIII

As a contributory cause of excessive mortality and sickness among young children, the employment of mothers away from their homes is even more important. There is no longer any serious dispute upon that point, though twenty-five years ago it was the subject of a good deal of vigorous controversy on both sides of the Atlantic.[28] Professor Jevons thoroughly established his claim that the employment of mothers and the ensuing neglect of their infants is a serious cause of infantile mortality and disease. So important did he consider the question to be that he strenuously advocated the enactment of legislation forbidding the employment of mothers until their youngest children were at least three years old.[29] When one who is familiar with the facts considers all that the employment of mothers involves, it is difficult to imagine how its evil effects upon the children could ever have been questioned. In too many cases the toil continues through the most critical periods of pregnancy; the infants are weaned early in order that the mother may return to her employment, and placed in charge of some other person—often a mere child, inexperienced and ignorant. These “little mothers” have been much praised and idealized until we have become prone to forget that their very existence is a great social menace and crime. It is true that many of them show a wonderful amount of courage and precocity in dealing with the babies intrusted to their care. But in praising these qualities we must not forget that they are still children, necessarily unfitted for the responsibilities thus placed upon them. Moreover, they themselves are the victims of a great social crime when their childhood is taken away and the cares of life which belong to grown men and women are thrust upon them.

BABIES OF A NEW YORK DAY NURSERY

The mothers of all these babies work away from their homes.
]

In a personal letter to the writer, Mr. Roscoe Doble, Clerk to the Health Board of Lawrence, Massachusetts, says: “Relative to the high infantile mortality, I can only say that ignorance in the preparation of food, illy ventilated tenements, and, in many cases, unavoidable neglect occasioned by the mothers being obliged to work away from the homes, often leaving their babies in the care of other children, seem to be the prime factors in the high mortality among children.” Similar testimony has been given by physicians and nurses wherever I have made inquiries, indicating a general consensus of opinion among experts upon the subject. A striking instance of the ignorance of these little girls to whom infants are intrusted was observed in Hamilton Fish Park when one of them gave a baby, apparently not more than four or five months old, soda water, banana, ice cream, and chewed cracker—all inside of twenty minutes.

In several factory towns I made careful investigations of the home conditions of a number of families where the mothers were employed away from their homes, noting particularly the rates of infantile mortality among them. The following typical schedule relates to five cases noted in the course of a single day in one of the small towns of New York:—

SCHEDULE

════╤═══╤════════╤══════════════════════════╤════════╤════════╤════════
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ Total │ │
│ │Average │ │ number │ No. of │ No. of
Name│Age│ Weekly │ Husband’s Work, Wages, │ of │Children│Children
│ │Earnings│ etc. │Children│ having │ now
│ │ │ │ Born │ Died │ Alive
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
────┼───┼────────┼──────────────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ │Mill laborer. Wages $9.00 │ │ │
Mrs.│43 │ $7.00 │ week but is often sick. │ 5 │ 5 │
M. │ │ │ Drinks heavily. │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
────┼───┼────────┼──────────────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────
│ │ │Laborer. Often unemployed.│ │ │
Mrs.│ │ │ Average wage the year │ │ │
K. │38 │ $6.50 │round not more than $7.00 │ 7 │ 5 │ 2
│ │ │ a week. │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
────┼───┼────────┼──────────────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────
│ │ │ │ │ │
Mrs.│ │ │ │ │ │
C. │34 │ $7.00 │ Deserted wife. │ 6 │ 4 │ 2
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
────┼───┼────────┼──────────────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
Mrs.│ │ │Sick two years and unable │ │ │
S. │29 │ $6.00 │ to work. Was a laborer │ 6 │ 3 │ 3
│ │ │ formerly. │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
────┼───┼────────┼──────────────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────
│ │ │ Dead 6 months. Was a │ │ │
│ │ │ laborer, often sick and │ │ │
Mrs.│41 │ $6.00 │unemployed. Widow does not│ 8 │ 5 │ 3
H. │ │ │ think he earned $6.00 a │ │ │
│ │ │ week the year round. │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
════╧═══╧════════╧══════════════════════════╧════════╧════════╧════════

════╤═══════════╤════════╤════════╤════════════════════════════════════
│ │ │ How │
│ │ │Children│
│Nationality│ Age of │ are │
Name│ of the │Youngest│ cared │ General Remarks
│ Parents │ Child │ for │
│ │ │ while │
│ │ │ Mother │
│ │ │ Works │
────┼───────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────────────────────────────
│ │ │ │All five died under 18 months of
│ Mother, │ │ │age; three of them under 6 months.
Mrs.│ Irish; │ │ │All the children were cared for by
M. │ Father, │ │ │other children while mother worked.
│ Scotch. │ │ │Three died of convulsions, two of
│ │ │ │diarrhœa.
────┼───────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────────────────────────────
│ Mother, │ │ │All five that died were under 12
Mrs.│ Irish │ 10 │By girl,│months of age. Two of them died of
K. │ American; │months. │ aged 9 │convulsions, one of acute gastritis,
│ Father, │ │ years. │two of measles. The baby is a puny
│ Swede. │ │ │little thing.
────┼───────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────────────────────────────
│ Mother, │ │ By │
Mrs.│ German; │ 18 │ oldest │One child was scalded to death while
C. │ Father, │months. │ girl, │mother was at work; one died of
│ Austrian. │ │ aged 9 │convulsions and two of bronchitis.
│ │ │ years. │
────┼───────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────────────────────────────
│ │ │ │The first two children and the last
│ Mother │ │ By │born are alive; the third, fourth,
Mrs.│ English; │ │ father │and fifth are dead, each of them
S. │ Father, │2 years.│and girl│dying within the first year. Mother
│ American. │ │ of 7 │says they were poor, puny babies.
│ │ │ years. │Causes of death: Debility, 2;
│ │ │ │convulsions, 1.
────┼───────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────────────────────────────
│ Mother, │ │ By │The first two and the eighth born
│ American; │ │ oldest │are alive; the five intervening are
Mrs.│ Father │ 20 │girl, 11│dead. Four of these died within the
H. │(deceased),│months. │ years │first year. Causes of death:
│ French- │ │ old. │Debility, 2; intestinal dyspepsia,
│ Canadian. │ │ │2; bronchitis, 1.
════╧═══════════╧════════╧════════╧════════════════════════════════════

It will be observed that out of a total of 32 children born only 10 were alive at the time of the inquiry, and that of the number dead no less than 18 were under one year of age, the cause of death in most cases being associated with neglect and defective diet. Of the ten children surviving, six were decidedly weak, and the mothers said that they were “generally sick” and that somehow it seemed as if they “took” every sort of disease, a well-known condition of the undernourished child.

In the same town the case of a poor Hungarian mother was brought to my attention by one perfectly familiar with all the details, a witness of unassailable veracity. This poor Hungarian child-wife and mother was barely fifteen when her baby was born, but she had been working fully three years in the mill. When the child was born the father disappeared. “He was afraid he could never pay the cost,” the wife said in his defence. On the ninth day after her confinement she returned to her work, leaving the baby in charge of a girl nine years old.

A GROUP OF CHILDREN WHOSE MOTHERS ARE EMPLOYED AWAY FROM THEIR HOMES
]

Upon the day the baby was two weeks old, word came to the mother while at work that it had been taken suddenly ill and imploring her to return to it at once. Terrified, she sought the foreman of her department and begged to be allowed to go home. “Ma chil seek! Ma chil die!” she cried. But the foreman needed her and scowled; they were “rushed” in the winding-room. And so he refused to grant her the permission she sought—refused with foul objurgations. Heartbroken, she went to another, superior, foreman and in broken English begged to be allowed to go to her sick babe. “Ma chil seek! Ma chil die!” she cried incessantly. This foreman also refused at first to let her go. Perhaps it was because he thought of his own daughter that he relented at last and gave her permission to go home—_permission_ to give a mother’s care to the child born of her travail! Eye-witnesses say that she sank down upon her knees and, with hysterical gratitude, kissed the foreman’s rough, dirty hands. “You good man! You good man!” she shrieked, then fled from the mill with frenzied haste.

But when she reached her little tenement home in “Hunk’s town” the baby was already dead, and there was only a lifeless form for her to clasp in her arms. The life of an infant child is too frail a thing, and too uncertain, to permit us to say that a mother’s care would have sufficed to save that babe. But the doctor said neglect was the cause of death, and the poor mother has moaned daily these many months, “If I no work, ma chil die not. I work an’ kill ma chil!”

Thirty-five years ago Paris was besieged by Germany’s vast army. For months the war raged with terrible cost to invader and invaded; industry was paralyzed and factories were closed down, with the result that there was the most frightful poverty due to unemployment. But, because the mothers were forced to stay at home, and were thus enabled to give their children their personal care and attention instead of trusting them to the “little mothers,” the mortality of infants decreased by 40 per cent. No other explanation of that striking fact, so far as I am aware, has ever been attempted.[30] Very similar was the effect upon the infantile death-rate during the great cotton famine in Lancashire as a result of the prolonged unemployment of so many hundreds of mothers. Notwithstanding the immense increase in poverty, the fact that the mothers could personally care for their infants more than compensated for it and lowered the rate of mortality in a most striking manner.[31] These examples of a profound social fact are sufficient for our present purpose, though, were it necessary, they might be indefinitely multiplied.

IX

Perhaps the employment of mothers too close to the time of childbirth, both before and after, is almost as important as the subsequent neglect and intrusting of children to the tender mercies of ignorant and irresponsible caretakers. Élie Reclus tells us that among savages it is the universal custom to exempt their women from toil during stated periods prior to and following childbirth,[32] and in most countries legislation has been enacted forbidding the employment of women within a certain given period from the birth of a child. In Switzerland the employment of mothers is prohibited for two months before confinement and the same period afterwards.[33] At present the English law forbids the employment of a mother within four weeks after she has given birth to a child, and the trend of public opinion seems to be in favor of the extension of the period of exemption to the standard set by the Swiss law.[34] So far as I am aware there exists no legislation of this kind in the United States, in which respect we stand alone among the great nations, and behind the savage of all lands and ages.

Wherever women are employed in large numbers, as, for example, in the textile industries and in cigar-making, the need for such legislation has presented itself, and it is impossible, unfortunately, to think that the absence of it in this country indicates a like absence of need for it. Cases in which women endure the agony of parturition amid the roar and whirl of machinery, and the bed of childbirth is the factory floor, are by no means uncommon. From a large mill, less than twenty miles from New York City, four such cases were reported to me in less than three months. Careful personal investigation in each case revealed the fact that the unfortunate women had begged in vain that they might be allowed to go home. One such case occurred on the morning of June 27 of this year, and was reported to me that same evening by letter. The writer of the letter is well known to me and his testimony unimpeachable.

A poor Slav woman, little more than a child in years, begged for permission to go home because she felt ill and unable to stand. Notwithstanding that her condition was perfectly evident, her appeal was denied with most brutal oaths. Cowering with fear she shrank away back to her loom with tears of shame and physical agony. Soon afterward her shrieks were heard above the din of the mill and there, in the presence of scores of workers of both sexes,—many of whom were girls of fourteen years of age,—her child was born. Perhaps it is fortunate that the child did not live to be a constant reminder to the poor woman of that hour of unspeakable shame and suffering! The young daughter of my correspondent was one of the witnesses of this shameful, inhuman thing. Subsequently I secured ample corroboration of the story from the local Slav priest who knew the poor woman and visited her soon after the occurrence. When I showed the letter of my informant to a local physician, he acknowledged that he had heard of other similar cases occurring and begged me to see one of the principal owners of the mill and secure the discharge of the foreman whose name was given. As if that could do any good! What good would be accomplished by securing the discharge of the man, and possibly bringing him and his family to poverty? That it would salve the conscience of the mill owner is probable. That it would be a well-deserved rebuke of the foreman’s inhumanity is likewise true. But it would not contribute in any way to the solution of the problem of which the case in question was but one of many examples.

A SAMPLE REPORT

Careful investigation showed this report to be absolutely correct
except for the fact that the birth was normal and not “premature.”
]

Not long ago, in one of the largest cigar factories in New York, a woman left her bench with a cry of agony and sank down in a corner of the factory, where, in the presence of scores of workers of both sexes, whose gay laughter and chatter her shrieks had stilled, she became a mother. The poor woman afterwards confessed that she had feared that it might happen so, but said she “wanted to get in another day so as to have a full week’s pay and money for the doctor.” Within two weeks she was back again at her trade, but in another shop, her baby being left in the care of an old woman of seventy who supports herself by caring for little children at a charge of five cents per day. In another factory a woman returned to work on the seventh day after her confinement, but was sent back by the foreman. This woman, a Bohemian, explained that she did not feel well enough to work but feared that she might lose her place if she remained longer away. The dread prospect of unemployment and hunger had forced her from her bed to face the awful perils attendant upon premature exertion and exposure. Had she been a “savage heathen” in the kraal of some Kaffir tribe in Africa she would have been shielded, protected, and spared this peril, but she was in a civilized country, in the richest city of the world, and therefore unprotected!

In many factories, probably a majority, women in whom the signs of approaching motherhood are conspicuous are discharged. “It don’t take two people to run this loom,” or “Two can’t work at one job,” are typically brutal examples of the language employed by bosses of a certain type upon such occasions. The fear of being discharged causes many a poor woman to adopt the most pitiful means to hide her condition from the boss. “It wouldn’t be so bad if we were only laid off for a few weeks, but it’s getting fired and the trouble of finding a new job that hurts,” they say. But the consequences are too serious alike to mother and child, to justify legislative neglect or the dependence upon the wisdom or humanity of employers or foremen. In many cases, doubtless, sympathy for the women themselves and the knowledge that discharge, or even suspension for a few weeks, would mean increased poverty and hardship, induces foremen to allow them to remain at work as long as they can stand. But in many other instances the condition of business and the needs of the employer at the moment determine the question. If the mill or factory is busy and in need of hands, the pregnant woman is rarely discharged; if there is difficulty in obtaining workers in certain unpopular departments, like the winding-room of a textile mill, for instance, such a woman will frequently be given the option of ceasing work or going into the less popular department, generally at less wages.

The evil is apparent, but the remedy is not so obvious. That no woman should be permitted to work during a period of six or eight weeks immediately before and after childbirth may be agreed, but then the necessity arises for some adequate means of securing her proper maintenance during her necessary and enforced idleness. To forbid her employment without making provision for her needs would possibly be an even greater evil than now cries for remedy. The question really resolves itself into this: Is civilized man equal to the task which the savage everywhere fulfils? Private philanthropy has occasionally grappled with this problem and the results have been highly significant of what might be accomplished if what has been done as a matter of charity in a few cases could be done generally as a matter of justice and right. Of these private experiments perhaps the most famous of all are those of the celebrated Alsatian manufacturer, M. Jean Dolphus, and the Messrs. Fox Brothers, of Wellington, Somerset, England.

M. Dolphus found that in his factory at Mülhausen, where a large number of married women were employed, the mothers lost over 40 per cent of their babies in the first year, though the average at that age for the whole district was only 18 per cent. He noticed, moreover, that the mortality was greatest in the first three months of life, and that set him thinking of a remedy. He decided therefore to require all mothers to remain away from their work for a period of six weeks after childbirth, during which time he undertook to pay them their wages in full. The results were astonishing, the decrease in infantile mortality in the first year being from more than 40 to less than 18 per cent.[35] Other employers followed with similarly beneficent results, among these being the firm of Fox Brothers, who employed considerably over one thousand persons, more than half of whom were women. They paid wages for three weeks only, but provided excellent _crèches_ with competent matrons in charge for the care of the infants whose mothers were at work. There, also, the infantile death-rate was very materially reduced, though, owing to the fact that no statistics showing the rate among children whose mothers were employed by the firm prior to the introduction of the plan exist, it cannot be statistically represented. Mr. Charles H. Fox, head of the firm, is authority for the statement that the reduction was extensive.[36] The importance of these experiments, especially in conjunction with the experiences of Paris in the great siege and Lancashire in the cotton famine, cannot easily be overestimated. They clearly show that not only hunger, but that other aspect of poverty hardly less important, the neglect of infants through industrial conditions which force the mothers to neglect them, are responsible for an alarming sacrifice of life year by year, and that it is possible to reduce materially the rate of infant mortality by improving the economic circumstances of the parents.

X

No study of this problem can be regarded as satisfactory which ignores the question of poverty and its relation to the number of still-births, yet we can only touch briefly upon it. No brutal Malthusian cynicism, but a calm view of such facts as those cited, leaves the impression that, however it might be under other and more humane social conditions, still-birth means very often a child’s escape from a life of suffering and misery. It is surely better that a babe should be strangled in the process of delivery from its mother’s womb, never to utter a cry, than that it should live to cry of hunger which its mother cannot appease, or from the torture of food unsuited to its little stomach! When a mother suffers all the pain and anxiety caused by the struggling life within her, and in her travail goes down to the brink of the grave, only to be mocked at last by a lifeless thing, she suffers the supreme anguish of her kind. Last year there were more than 6000 such tragedies in the city of New York alone, and the number in the whole country was probably not less than 80,000.

Some of the best authorities upon the subject of vital statistics insist that still-births should be included in the death-rates, and in many foreign cities, notably Berlin,[37] they are so included. If such a method were adopted in this country, it is easy to see how important the effects would be upon the tables of mortality. Whatever opinions they may hold upon the moot question of regarding still-births as deaths in all enumerations, all authorities appear to agree that the circumstances of the mothers influence the numbers of the still-born as surely as they do the actual infantile death-rates. Six physicians of large obstetrical experience were asked to estimate what percentage of the still-born should be ascribed to the influence of poverty, and the average of their replies was 60 per cent.

BABIES WHOSE MOTHERS WORK CARED FOR IN A _CRÈCHE_
]

That may be an overestimate, or it may be, and probably is, an underestimate. If we assume it to be fairly correct, it means that in one city something like 3700 mothers needlessly endured the supreme agony, and as many lives were sacrificed to poverty. It means that to the 80,000 babies annually devoured by the wolf of poverty must be added another 45,000 killed by the same cruel foe in the passage of the race from the womb of dependence to a separate existence. Whatever the number may be, it is certain that many are still-born because of the fatigue and overexertion of the mothers in the critical periods of pregnancy and that many more are suffocated in the passage from the womb because of the employment of untrained and unskilled midwives—especially, as often is the case, when the “midwife” is only a kindly neighbor called in because of the poverty of the family to which the child comes. And it may be added, incidentally, that still-birth is not by any means the only danger from this source, nor the most lamentable. Many accidents of a non-fatal character occur at birth which seriously affect the whole of life. Carelessness, inexperience, and ignorance may cause the suffocation of the child, or by pressure upon some delicate nerve centre irreparable injury may be caused to it, such as paralysis for life or hopeless imbecility.[38]

XI

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.

A “LUNG BLOCK” CHILD IN A TRAGICALLY SUGGESTIVE POSITION
]

II

In a careful analysis of the principal data available, Mr. Robert Hunter has attempted the difficult task of estimating the measure of privation, and his conclusion is that in normal times there are at least 10,000,000 persons in the United States in poverty.[43] That is to say, there are so many persons underfed, poorly housed, underclad, and having no security in the means of life. As an incidental condition he has observed that poverty’s misery falls most heavily upon the children, and that there are probably not less than from 60,000 to 70,000 children in New York city alone “who often arrive at school hungry and unfitted to do well the work required.”[44] By a section of the press that statement was garbled into something very different, that 70,000 children in New York city go “breakfastless” to school every day. In that form the statement was naturally and very justly criticised, for, of course, nothing like that number of children go absolutely without breakfast. It is not, however, a question of children going without breakfast, but of children who are _underfed_, and the latter word would have been better fitted to express the real meaning of the original statement than the word “hungry.” Many thousands of little children go breakfastless to school at times, but the real problem is much more extensive than that and embraces that much more numerous class of children who are chronically underfed, either because their food is insufficient in quantity, or, what is the same thing in the end, poor in quality and lacking in nutriment.

It is noteworthy that no serious criticism of the estimate that there are 10,000,000 in poverty has been attempted. Some of the most experienced philanthropic workers in the country have indeed urged that it is altogether too low. I am myself convinced that the estimate is a most conservative one. It would be warranted alone by the figures of unemployment, which show that in 1900, a year of fairly normal industrial conditions, 2,000,000 male wage-earners were unemployed for from four to six months. But to these figures Mr. Hunter adds a mass of corroborative facts which suggest that the only just criticism which can be made of his estimate is that it is an understatement. And, if there are 10,000,000 persons in poverty in the United States, there must be at least 3,300,000 of that number under fourteen years of age.

To test the accuracy of the statistics of unemployment, low wages, sickness, charitable relief, etc., by detailed investigation would be an impossible task for any private investigator. No such test could be effectively carried out in a single great city by private agencies. But, while they are open to the criticisms which all such statistics are subject to, those given by Mr. Hunter represent the most reliable data available. They justify, I believe, the conclusion that in normal times there are not less than 3,300,000 children under fourteen years of age in poverty, and a considerably greater number in periods of unusual depression. If we divide this number into two age groups, those under five and those from five to fourteen, we shall find that there are 1,455,000 in the former group and 1,845,000 in the latter. It is a well-known fact, however, that poverty is far more prevalent among children over five years of age than among younger children, and it is safe to assume that of the total number of children estimated to be in poverty, there are fully 2,000,000 between the ages of five and fourteen years, nearly 12 per cent of the total number of children living in that age period. The importance of this from an educational point of view is apparent when it is remembered that from five to fourteen years is the principal period of school attendance.

III

This problem of poverty in its relation to childhood and education is, to us in America, quite new. We have not studied it as it has been studied in England and other European countries where, for many years, it has been the subject of much investigation and experiment. When it was suggested that 60,000 or 70,000 children go to school in our greatest city in an underfed condition, and when Dr. W. H. Maxwell, superintendent of the Board of Education of New York City, declared in a public address that there are hundreds of thousands of children in the public schools of the nation unable to study or learn because of their hunger,[45] something of a sensation was caused from one end of the land to the other. But in England, where for more than twenty years investigators have been studying the problem and experimenting, and have built up a considerable literature upon the subject, which has become one of the most pressing political problems of the time, they have become so conversant with the facts that no fresh recital, however eloquent, can create anything like a sensation. And what is true of England is true of almost every other country in Europe. Only we in the United States have ignored this terrible problem of child hunger. We have so long been used to express our commiseration with the Old World on account of the heavy burden of pauperism beneath which it groans, and to boast of our greater prosperity and happiness, that we have hardly observed the ominous signs that similar causes at work among us are fast producing similar results. Now we have awakened to the fact that here, too, are two nations within the nation,—the nation of the rich and the nation of the poor,—and that Fourier’s terrible prophecy of “poverty through plethora,” has found fulfilment in the land where he fondly dreamed that his Utopia might be realized. The poverty problem is to-day the supreme challenge to our national conscience and instincts of self-preservation, and its saddest and most alarming feature is the suffering and doom it imposes upon the children.

Such investigations as have been made by Mr. Hunter, myself, and others in New York and other large cities, meagre as they have been, tend to the conclusion that the extent of the evil of underfeeding has not been exaggerated. It is true that the Board of Education of New York City appointed a special committee to investigate the subject and that their report, based upon the testimony of a number of school principals and teachers, would indicate that only a very small number of children in our public schools suffer from underfeeding. Many persons who regarded that report as the conclusive answer of the expert were at once satisfied. In order that the reader may better understand the investigations herein summarized and view them without prejudice, it may be well to digress somewhat to discuss that very optimistic report.

At a very early period of the agitation upon the subject, and before the Board of Education had discussed it, I undertook a series of investigations with a view to testing as far as possible Mr. Hunter’s estimate. My investigations included personal observation and inquiry in a number of public schools in various parts of the city having a total attendance of something more than 28,000 children. When the Board of Education took action upon the matter and appointed its special committee, I was already far advanced in that work. Realizing that the value of such an inquiry as the Board of Education had decided upon must depend entirely upon the methods adopted, I turned my attention to the task of watching carefully the “investigation.” It was a case of investigating an investigation. When the special committee met I laid before the members certain evidence of the utter worthlessness of the reports they had received from the schools, as well as some of the information I had gathered concerning the extent of the evil of underfeeding, in the hope that the committee might be induced to undertake a careful and extensive investigation of the whole subject by a body of experts.

In the first place, the official inquiry had been confined to the number of “breakfastless” children, and, secondly, the principals had no instructions as to the manner in which their inquiries should be conducted. The various District Superintendents merely requested the principals to “carefully investigate” and report the number of children attending school without breakfast, in some cases forty-eight hours being allowed and in many others only twenty-four hours. The result of this lack of method and system was most deplorable, many of the principals adopting methods of investigation which not only proved quite futile, but, what is more important, effectually destroyed all chances of proper investigation for the time being. From the statements submitted to the committee, I quote two examples as showing the character of the “evidence” upon which its report was based.

IV

The principal of a large school on the West Side reported that “after careful inquiries” he had found only one little girl who came to school without breakfast, and she did so from choice, saying, “Because I never used to have any breakfast in Germany, sir, and didn’t want any.” There were also two boys, Syrians, who said that they had three meals each day but could never get enough to eat. The little girl insisted that she “always had a good lunch.” Here, then, was a big school with over two thousand pupils, representing twenty different nationalities, in which there were only three possible cases of underfeeding, the element of doubt being strong in each case! Every one who has had the least experience of work amongst the poor knows perfectly well that it would be absolutely impossible to gather together 2000 children from the tenements of any city without including many more cases of undoubted hardship and suffering. And the neighborhood of this school is a particularly poor one. Close to the school are some of the foulest tenements to be found in the whole city. The crowding of two families in one room is common, and poverty and squalor are abundantly evidenced on every hand.

After the principal had told me of his report I went over the district with the Captain of the neighboring Slum Post of the Salvation Army. The Captain knew personally several children attending the school who were literally half starved. Out of 26 children, boys and girls, at the free breakfast one morning there were 22 from the school, and their hunger and misery were beyond question. One little boy was barely seven years old, and a more woful appearance than he presented cannot well be imagined. He had come to the breakfast station two days before the date of our visit, the Captain said, literally famishing, filthy, and covered with sores. The good woman had fed and cleaned the poor little waif and bandaged his feet and legs. “It was an awful job,” she said, “for he was so dirty. It took four changes of water to get him well cleaned. Then I bandaged him and got some old but clean clothes for him.” Even so, after two days of such feeding and care as he had never known before, the poor child looked forlorn, weak, and inexpressibly miserable. Little Mike’s case was doubtless exceptionally bad, but it is not too much to say that the whole district is a wen of terrible poverty. Yet from the principal’s report it would seem that the children bear no share of its hardships and privations. And this is impossible. It is the children who suffer most of all.

To account for the principal’s roseate and obviously misleading report, it is only necessary to understand how the inquiry was made upon which the report was based. Asked to explain how he had made his investigation, the principal said, “I went to every class and asked all those children who had had no breakfast to stand up.” When it is remembered that children are naturally very sensitive about their poverty, regarding it as being something in the nature of a personal degradation, nothing need be said to show the futility of such a method of inquiry. I have frequently known children on the verge of exhaustion to deny that they were hungry, so keenly do they feel that poverty is a disgrace. I saw the little girl and the two Syrian boys in the presence of the principal upon the occasion of my second visit to the school and questioned them. The two boys said, through an interpreter, that they had bread and coffee for every meal and vigorously denied having had butter, jam, milk, eggs, or meat of any kind. They certainly looked anæmic, weak, and underfed. The little girl’s story, which I could get only by dint of careful and sympathetic questioning, epitomizes the whole problem of underfeeding as it affects thousands of children. She gave at first practically the same answer as she had given the principal, saying that she did not have breakfast because she was not accustomed to it and didn’t need it, and that she always had a good lunch.

But her full story revealed a very different condition from what these innocent replies would indicate. Both her parents go out to work, leaving home soon after five o’clock in the morning. The father is a laborer employed at the docks, and the mother works in the kitchen of a cheap restaurant. They go away leaving the little girl in bed, and when she rises there is generally some cold coffee and bread for her. But there is no clock, and she does not know the time and is afraid of being late to school and does not stay to eat. “Sometimes, when papa has no work, there is no food left for me to eat,” she said. Then she told of her “good lunch.” Generally there is five cents left upon the table for her to buy lunch with. “Only when papa is not working is there no money left.” On the day of my interview with her she had spent her five cents for a cup of coffee with nothing at all to eat, as she had done for two or three successive days. Asked why she had not bought something to eat, or a glass of milk, instead of coffee, she answered, “Because coffee is hot, sir, and I was so cold.” Her father returns home at six o’clock in the evening and sends her to the delicatessen store to buy something—generally bologna sausage—for their evening meal. The mother, who eats at the restaurant, does not return until about two hours later. From this fuller story of the little girl’s life it is seen that her “good lunch” day after day consists of a cup of coffee without a morsel of food, and that she fasts frequently, almost constantly, from the evening of one day to the evening of the next.

Such tactlessness on the part of the principal of a great public school seems almost incredible. But it is a fact that most teachers seem to have no other method of finding out anything from their children than by calling upon them to “show hands,” notwithstanding that experience proves it to be a most unreliable one. Children not only shrink from confessing their poverty and hunger, but they are also quick to give the answers desired by the teacher, even though the teacher’s feelings are only manifested by a slight inflection of voice. Public examination of the children is a useless as well as most cruel method to adopt. But it was generally adopted, and I could cite case after case from my notes. One other case, however, must suffice. The principal of one of the smallest schools in the city, situated on the East Side in a poor Italian district, assured me that there were practically no hungry or underfed children in the school. Asked to estimate the number of such children, she said that they were “less than 1 per cent of the attendance.” She had found 9 cases of destitution just previously as a result of an inquiry made through the teachers, which, as was pointed out to her, meant fully 2 per cent of the attendance. For the total enrolment in this school is less than 500 and the average attendance not more than 450. Asked how the 9 cases had been discovered, the principal replied, “Why, I simply went to each class and asked, ‘What little boy or girl did not have breakfast to-day, or not enough breakfast? Please show hands.’” There was, she said, no doubt whatever that the 9 children were the victims of great poverty. That as many as 2 per cent of the children should, under the circumstances, confess their poverty is undoubtedly a most serious fact and indicates a much larger number of actual victims.

How such a method of examination intimidates the children and fails to elicit the truth, the following incident, related as nearly as possible in the principal’s own words, will show. It relates to a little boy whom we will call Tony:—

“I went to a classroom and asked: ‘How many children had no breakfast to-day? Show hands!’ Not a single hand went up. Then the teacher said, ‘Why, I am sure that boy, Tony, looks as if he were half starved.’ And he really did, so I told him to stand up and questioned him. ‘Did you have any breakfast this morning, Tony?’ I asked. He hung his head for a minute and then said, ‘No, mum.’