A BEIEF SUMMARY OF THE PROBLEM 155 



ing the third child, one might brand it, setting upon 

 its brow the mark of death. When all the children 

 had thus been sorted out, and one-third of them all 

 gathered into a multitude of branded victims, each 

 wearing the death symbol, would there be a single 

 man or woman in the land with soul unstirred by 

 grief? Would there be a human heart that did not 

 throb with the agony and shame of the carnage ? 



And yet, in a less dramatic fashion, that very thing 

 is happening every year. One-third of all the babies 

 are taken by death before they reach the age of five 

 — and the nation hardly heeds the fact. Why ? 

 Apparently because the dramatic element is lacking. 

 There are no stage effects. There is no great holiday 

 devoted to a slaughter of the innocents ; the babies 

 are not massed in one great throng, but scattered over 

 the land, lying in a hundred thousand cradles or play- 

 ing in tens of thousands of homes ; there is no brand 

 upon their brows to mark them off from other babies. 

 Of course, there is less that is dramatic when babies, 

 instead of being set aside and branded with a death- 

 mark, just pine and die in their tenement homes. 

 But they die, nevertheless, and I cannot think of our 

 frightful infantile death-rate as being anythijig less 

 than terribly, shamefully wrong, every citizen shar- 

 ing in the crime and shame who does not work for 

 better conditions. 



It is not merely that one-third of the babies die 



