To the child as to the adult the principal evils of poverty are material ones,—lack of nourishing food, of suitable clothing, and of healthy home surroundings. These are the fundamental evils from which all others arise. The younger children are spared the anxiety, shame, and despair felt by their parents and by their older brothers and sisters, but they suffer terribly from neglect when, as so often happens, their mothers are forced to abandon the most important functions of motherhood to become wage-earners. The cry of a child for food which its mother is powerless to give it is the most awful cry the ages have known. Even the sound of battle, the mingled shrieks of wounded man and beast, and the roar of guns, cannot vie with it in horror. Yet that cry goes up incessantly: in the world’s richest cities the child’s hunger-cry rises above the din of the mart. Fortunate indeed is the child whose lips have never uttered that cry, who has never gone breakfastless to play or supperless to bed. For periods of destitution come sooner or later to a majority of the proletarian class. Practically all the unskilled laborers and hundreds of thousands engaged in the skilled trades are so entirely dependent upon their weekly wages, that a month’s sickness or unemployment brings them to hunger and temporary dependence. Not long ago, in the course of an address before the members of a labor union, I asked all those present who had ever had to go hungry, or to see their children hungry, as a result of sickness, accident, or unemployment to raise their hands. No less than one hundred and eighty-four hands were raised out of a total attendance of two hundred and nineteen present, yet these were all skilled workers protected in a measure by their organization. [Illustration: A GROUP OF “LUNG BLOCK” CHILDREN The white symbol of a child’s death hangs on a door in the background. ]