Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/27

Rh Lucullus are eaten every day, and, if it be but cool, the very greyhounds wear dainty blankets—in these centers of wealth and power and refinement, there are always hungry men and women and little children. Never the sun goes down but on human beings prowling like wolves for food, or huddling together like vermin for shelter and warmth. "Always with You" is the significant heading under which a New York paper, in these most prosperous times, publishes daily the tales of chronic famine; and in the greatest and richest city in the world—in that very London where the plenty of meat in the butchers' shops seemed to some savages the most wondrous of all its wonderful sights—in that very London, the mortuary reports have a standing column for deaths by starvation.

But no more in its chronic than in its spasmodic forms is famine to be measured by the deaths from starvation. Perfect, indeed, in all its parts must be the human machine if it can run till the last bit of available tissue be drawn on to feed its fires. It is under the guise of disease to which physicians can give less shocking names, that famine—especially the chronic famine of civilization—kills. And the statistics of mortality, especially of infant mortality, show that in the richest communities famine is constantly at its work. Insufficient nourishment, inadequate warmth and clothing, and unwholesome surroundings, constantly, in the very centers of plenty, swell the death-rates. What is this but famine—just such famine as the Irish famine? It is not that the needed things are really scarce; but that those whose need is direst have not the means to get them, and, when not relieved by charity, want kills them in its various ways. When, in the hot midsummer, little children die like flies in the New York tenement wards, what is that but famine? And those barges crowded with such children that a noble and tender charity sends down New York Harbor to catch the fresh