All day long and during every moment of it, a thousand delicate processes of growth and unfoldment and of intricate adjustments are going on mysteriously within the shaping brain and body of a child. Subconsciously, these are a continued tax and strain; making him hyper-sensitive, irritable, cross, perhaps, for causes that appear inadequate. A child is like a convalescent, in that he uses up rapidly for growth and development all the nutritive material and vital energy at his disposal. This is true of healthy, well-nurtured children. What then of these child-martyrs of The Poor, who in addition to the strain of growth, are ill-fed, poisoned by unsuitable foods; are sickly, rickety, bronchitic, dyspeptic, syphilitic, phthisical? Nevertheless, all the maternal care these miserables receive are such rough dregs of kindness and of patience as may be left over from the toil of their working-mothers' hard, exhausting days. It is no less than monstrous that our laws allow the nation's babes and children--to whom are due all the best resources of maternal care and tenderness and duly-trained maternal powers--to be thus martyred. As substitute for the home and for their mothers--which are every child's birthright--more and more, infants and young children are consigned now to Crèches; chill institutions of alien atmosphere, alien surroundings, alien nurses, where, unmothered, they are ciphers among other unmothered alien ciphers. Yet babies and young children are so pathetically constituted that they prefer blows from their mothers to caresses from strangers. X The life-story written in the faces of the great majority of our Twentieth-Century babes and children is a terrible one, in its revelation of tortured helplessness, hopeless resignation, unnatural fortitude, blank despair. See them sunk, limp and dejected, in their prams or go-carts, eyes staring forward on the dreary waste their lives are; limbs dangling, like those of toys with broken springs. In cities, mothers, ignorant of the shock and injury which noise and turmoil inflict upon these sensitive brains and nerves, wheel them amid jostling crowds--in order that they themselves may enjoy the excitements of the shops. At the low level of their prams, they breathe air vitiated by the passers-by; are in the exhausting whirl and press of swirling nerve-currents. In their poor ill-made carriages, they are jerked abruptly, now up, now down, at every kerb; with no more care or tenderness than though they were baskets of clothes. They sit patient, leaden, apathetic; cruelly strapped for hours together in one position; neither pulse of health nor spirit in them.