Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/205

Rh its head and legs are bare ; and the most hurtful foods are given it to silence the unwelcome bawl.

At the end of its first year, the mother-instinct is apt to weaken, and even though no other claimant for nurture appears, the infant is turned adrift in alley or street to run a thousand risks. Diminutive creatures battle for life in the filthy tenements, frequently in rain. "I worked in the mill and her grandmother neglected her," wailed the mother of a beautiful and cheery little maid of four years who had been suddenly stricken with paralysis and blindness, but who hitched her red rocker towards the visitor's voice, piping forth, "I'm named Ellie. What's oo name?"

Even those of the poor who dower their children with strong constitutions are pitifully apathetic to unhealthful conditions which deplete the family ranks. One woman, robust and vigorous, lost by an epidemic two babies within a week, yet stayed on in the fatal tenement. Shortly after, in thirty-eight hours' time, four more of her little brood died, victims of her ignorance or inertia ; yet still she lingered where six of her offspring had perished. Soon the death of the seventh at last drove her, with only the oldest son surviving, into a cleaner abode which doubtless through her own shiftlessness will become another fever trap. In many cases the worker is not to blame for the unsanitary condition of his home, as where occupancy of the "Company's houses" is a condition of employment. The manager of a mill "block" where typhus with deadly virulence had threshed out the weakliest, remarked of a tenant loom-fixer, "That man had five girls and boys when he took our rooms. A fortnight later, he moved out with only two. I hadn't the heart to charge him rent.' What sort of "heart" let him go into the house when death was well-nigh certain?

Housekeeping, in the good old Anglo-Saxon meaning of care for every detail, order and sweet prevision is, among very many working mothers, not a lost, but an undiscovered art. Beds are often still unmade and sleeping-rooms foul at five o'clock in the afternoon. Viands cooked and uncooked lie open all day near