e of the
terrible evils from which our children suffer. _I know_ that the
things written are true. Every line of them was written with the
single purpose of telling the truth as I had seen it.

I made the terrible assertions that more than eighty thousand babies
are slain by poverty in America each year; that some "2,000,000
children of school age in the United States are the victims of poverty
which denies them common necessities, particularly adequate
nourishment"; that there were at least 1,750,000 children at work in
this country. These statements, and the evidence given in support of
them, attracted widespread attention, both in this country and in
Europe. They were cited in the U.S. Senate and in Europe parliaments.
They were preached about from thousands of pulpits and discussed from
a thousand platforms by politicians, social reformers and others.

A committee was formed in New York City to promote the physical
welfare of school children. Although one of the first to take the
matter up, I was not asked to serve on that committee, on account of
the fact, as I was afterwards told, of my being a Socialist. Well,
that Committee, composed entirely of non-Socialists, and including
some very bitter opponents of Socialism, made an investigation of the
health of school children in New York City. They examined, medically,
some 1,400 children of various ages, living in different parts of the
city and belonging to various social classes. If the results they
discovered are common to the whole of the United States, the
conditions are in every way worse than I had declared them to be.

_If the conditions found by the medical investigators for this
committee are representative of the whole of the United States, then
we have not less than twelve million school children in the United
States suffering from physical defects more or less serious, and not
less than 1,248,000 suffering from malnutrition--from insufficient
nourishment, generally due to poverty, though not always--to such an
extent that they need medical attention._[4]

Do you think a nation with such conditions existing at its very heart
ought to be called a civilized nation? I don't. I say that it is a
_brutalized_ nation, Jonathan!

And now I want you to look over a list of another kind of shameful
social conditions--a list of some of the vast fortunes possessed by
men who are not victims of poverty, but of shameful wealth. I take the
list from the dryasdust pa