a healthy parentage had commingled, if the blood
its mother gave it had been hot and red and the milk she suckled it to
white and sweet and clean from the fount of vigorous womanhood! What
then? Then, surely it had been sleeping now with chubby limbs flung wide,
its breathing so soft that you had to bend your ear to its red lips to
hear it, had been lying wearied with dancing and mischief-making and
shouting and toddling and falling, resting the night from a happy to-day
till the dawn woke it betime for a happy to-morrow. All this it should
have had as a birthright, with the years stretching in front of it, on
through fiery youth, past earnest manhood, to a loved and loving old age.
This is the due, the rightful due, of every child to whom life goes from
us. And that child who is born to sorrow and sordid care, pot-bound from
its mother's womb by encircling conditions that none single-handed can
break, is wronged and sinned against by us all most foully. If it dies we
murder it. If it lives to suffer we crucify it. If it steals we
instigate, despite our canting hypocrisy. And if it murders we who hang
it have beforehand hypnotised its will and armed its hand to slay."

* * * * *

So Nellie thought, the tears drying on her cheeks, leaning forward to
watch the twitching, purpled face of the hard-breathing child.

* * * * *

"Is there not a curse upon us and our people, upon our children and our
children's children, for every little one we murder by our social sins?
Can it be that Nemesis sleeps for us, he who never slept yet for any, he
who never yet saw wrong go unavenged or heard the innocent blood cry
unanswered from the ground?

"Can it be that he has closed his ears to the dragging footfalls of the
harlot host and to the sobs of strong men hopeless and anguished because
work is wanting and to the sighing of wearied women and to the
death-rattle of slaughtered babes? Surely though God is not and Humanity
is weak yet Nemesis is strong and sleepless and lingers not! Surely he
will tear down the slum and whelm the robbers in their iniquity and
visit upon us all punishment for the crime which all alike have shared!
Into the pit which we have left digged for the children of others shall
not our own children fall? Is happiness safe for any while to any
happiness is denied?

"It is a crime that a baby should live so and die so. It is a villainy
and we all are villains who let it be. No matter how many are guilty,
eac