On the rich lies the whole responsibility of want and
disease and crime. Equalize property, and these three dark shadows flee
fast before the sunshine of prosperity. Character, intelligence, common
decencies and common virtues have nothing to do with present
conditions, and the ardent leveller of class-distinctions counts as his
enemy any one who seeks to give the poor a truer knowledge of how far
their earnings may be made to go toward securing better food or less
pestilent homes.
Yet foul air and overcrowding would be less fatal in their results were
food understood. The well-filled stomach gives strange powers of
resistance to the body, and nothing shows this more strongly than the
myriad cases of children and infants who are taken from the
tenement-houses to the sanitariums at Bath or Rockaway. A week or two
of pure air and plenty of milk gives a look almost of health to
children who have been brought there often with glazed eyes and
pinched, ghastly little faces. Air has meant half, but many mothers
have been persuaded to give milk or oatmeal porridge instead of weak
tea and bread poisoned with alum, and have found the child's strength
become a permanent and not temporary fact.
Pages:
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301