"
In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless. They die like
flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive
vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they
are surrounded. They have no home life. In the dens and lairs in which
they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent. And as
their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by bad
sanitation, overcrowding, and underfeeding. When a father and mother
live with three or four children in a room where the children take turn
about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those
children never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable
and weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors will
make can readily be imagined.
"Dull despair and misery
Lie about them from their birth;
Ugly curses, uglier mirth,
Are their earliest lullaby."
A man and a woman marry and set up housekeeping in one room. Their
income does not increase with the years, though their family does, and
the man is exceedingly lucky if he can keep his health and his job. A
baby comes, and then another.
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