SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS.
By Editor
A CORRESPONDENT sends us an article of some length under the above caption, showing the fearful death-rate among the children of Berlin and New York, from which we condense the following:— The mortuary statistics of the city of Berlin show that among the wealthy aristocracy the death-rate of children under five years is 57 per thousand, while among the poor it is 357 per thousand. This would imply that among the poor three children out of every ten die for no other reason than that their parents are poor. What a commentary upon our vaunted material progress! Our boasted twentieth-century civilization out-Herods Herod, for it kills 30 per cent of all poor children under five years of age, while that cruel king murdered only 50 per cent of the children under two. In New York City 15,000 infants die annually for want of fresh air. Yet there are in the United States 1,700,000,000 acres of unused land, or more than enough to give an acre of breathing space to every human being on the face of the earth. There is no doubt that in the crowded tenement districts of the large cities thousands of poor children are gasping their lives away in that sad process of air starvation. It is also a fact that the larger those cities grow the more that sorrowful condition will be seen, and the larger will be the host of the pale-faced, stricken children who have to pay the cost with their little lives. Our correspondent lays the blame for the condition upon the faulty law of distribution, which permits men to become possessors of the soil, and of great quantities of it. But the fault lies deeper than that. It is in the hearts of men. As long as unregenerated men continue in this world, they will continue to have the same ambitious plans, the same greed for self-aggrandizement and for gold, with the same lack of regard for the rights or the sufferings of others. The supremacy of a new political party will not change the hearts of men. Of course it would be better if every family had its plot of land with the blessings of sunlight and pure air; but the tendencies of the times are not in that direction. The great mass of the cities' teeming hosts do not want to move to the country. They are leaving the rural communities and crowding into these very cities, with their foul odors, their dusty streets, their disease-breeding tenements, their lack of sun, and their poverty of good air. Why are they doing it?—For no other reason than that they choose to do so. Considerations of health are secondary. They hope to be able to make more money in the city than they are making in the country. They think they see brighter prospects in the city. They want to be where the crowd is, and many are being drawn by the "attractions," and some even by the opportunities for wickedness. The spirit of immigration toward the cities is responsible for more of the premature deaths than is the faulty law of distribution; and to purge hearts of that greed which brings about this sad condition is a greater work than to inaugurate a Henry George, Campaign of ever so great magnitude.