Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/213

SOME SOCIAL ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 1 99 destitute woman whose son had St. Vitus' dance paid her last two dollars for a dog to sleep with him, believing that the disease would leave the boy and attack the animal, citing in proof the case of a child with "worm fits" who was said to have given the malady to two dogs which died in turn while the patient recovered. Curative efforts, nearly always thus illogical, the inadequate "instincts" of motherhood helpless to ward off murderous tenement house ills — these causes, besides contributing to infant mortality in all densely peopled centers, swell the record of sickness and inefficiency. The man or woman too inefficient to earn a living sometimes gets a living by guilty means. Our vast complicated machinery of hospitals and prisons now aids the survival of the weakliest, not the fittest, by providing for and in one sense rewarding and perpetuating disease, inebriety and crime. Yet all these evils might be nearly abolished, certainly greatly lessened in the next five generations, if parents could be induced to live up to the highest hygienic and ethical ideals — ideals hidden equally from fashion's slaves and those ground down by toil and want.

Thorough industrial training, such as is given in the house-keeping schools of France and Belgium, would enable the mothers of the working class so to order their households that neglected homes would not, as they now do, beget intemperance or the scandals of divorce. Nor, with the resource of skillful hands to mend and remake, and otherwise eke out their allowance, would wives need to supplement the husband's earnings by going themselves into the mills, thus by over-supply lowering wages for all. Less frequently would fragile, stunted child-rivals cheapen pay and take bread from the mouths of honest workers. Were domestic economy better understood and incomes more wisely laid out, child-labor would cease to be, as so many selfish or really underpaid toiling fathers now claim that it is, the only recourse against debt. The married female worker or the self-supporting single woman is not herself always responsible for those short comings which make her home wretched. She leaves it at six in the morning and except on Saturday does not return