And yet the experts say that the baby of the tenement is born physically equal to the baby of the mansion.[9] For countless years men have sung of the Democracy of Death, but it is only recently that science has brought us the more inspiring message of the Democracy of Birth. It is not only in the tomb that we are equal, where there is neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, but also in the womb of our mothers. At birth class distinctions are unknown. For long the hope-crushing thought of prenatal hunger, the thought that the mother’s hunger was shared by the unborn child, and that poverty began its blighting work on the child even before its birth, held us in its thrall. The thought that past generations have innocently conspired against the well-being of the child of to-day, and that this generation in its turn conspires against the child of the future, is surcharged with the pessimism which mocks every ideal and stifles every hope born in the soul. Nothing more horrible ever cast its shadow over the hearts of those who would labor for the world’s redemption from poverty than this spectre of prenatal privation and inherited debility. But science comes to dispel the gloom and bid us hope. Over and over again it was stated before the Interdepartmental Committee by the leading obstetrical authorities of the English medical profession that the proportion of children born healthy and strong is not greater among the rich than among the poor.[10] The differences appear after birth. Wise, patient Mother Nature provides with each succeeding generation opportunity to overcome the evils of ages of ignorance and wrong, with each generation the world starts afresh and unhampered, physically, at least, by the dead past. “The world’s great age begins anew, The golden years return.” And herein lies the greatest hope of the race; we are not handicapped from the start; we can begin with the child of to-day to make certain a brighter and nobler to-morrow as though there had never been a yesterday of woe and wrong.[B] II