156 THE COMMON SEN8E OF THE MILK QUESTION 



before they reach the age of five years. That is bad 

 enough, but it does not reveal all the awful truth. 

 The death toll is not so evenly and impartially ex- 

 acted, from rich and poor alike, as it would be if the 

 babies were massed and every third baby chosen for 

 the fatal branding. There would be in that case a 

 splendid, inflexible justice and the tears of the rich 

 and proud would mingle with the tears of the poor 

 and humble in a great democracy of grief and bitter 

 acknowledgment of the supremacy of death. "The 

 gods always throw the dice impartially," declared 

 Sophocles, the profound thinker who raised the Greek 

 drama to its highest intellectual level, and modern 

 science is coming more and more to that view. The 

 gods are impartial. Ninety per cent of all the babies 

 born into the world are, at the time of their birth, 

 fairly healthy and well nourished. When they come 

 into the world, the babies of the rich are in their 

 physical inheritance no richer than are the babies 

 of the poor.^ Hereditary diseases, like syphilis and 

 alcoholism, are fairly equally spread over all classes. 

 But, unlike the gods, man is partial and, to use the 

 simile of Sophocles, plays unfairly with loaded dice. 

 So there are vast differences in the death-rates of the 

 babies. There are streets in all the great cities of 

 the world where instead of one-third, one-half of the 

 babies born perish during the first five years, or even 

 during the first year; there are courts, alleys, and 



