An epidemic of measles spreads over the great city. Silently and mysteriously it enters and, unseen, touches a single child in the street or the school, and the result is as the touch of the blazing torch to dry stubble and straw; only it is not stubble but the nation’s heart, its future citizenry, that is attacked. From child to child, home to home, street to street, the epidemic spreads; mansion and tenement are alike stricken, and the city is engaged in a fierce battle against the foe which assails its children. In the tenement districts doctors and nurses hurry through the sun-scorched streets and wearily climb the long flights of stairs hour after hour, day after day; in the districts where the rich live, doctors drive in their carriages to the mansions, and nurses tread noiselessly in and out of the sick rooms. Rich and poor alike struggle against the foe, but it is only in the homes of the poor that there is no hope in the struggle; only there that the doctors can say no comforting words of assurance. When the battle is over and the victims are numbered, there is rejoicing in the mansion and bitter, poignant sorrow in the tenement. For poor children are practically the only ones ever to die from measles. Nature starts all her children equally, rich and poor, but the evil conditions of poverty create and foster vast inequalities of opportunity to live and flourish. Dr. Henry Ashby, an eminent authority upon children’s diseases, says: “_In healthy children among the well-to-do class the mortality_ (from measles) _is practically nil, in the tubercular and wasted children to be found in workhouses, hospitals, and among the lower classes, the mortality is enormous, no disease more certainly being attended with a fatal result_. William Squires places it in crowded wards at 20 to 30 per cent of those attacked. Among dispensary patients the mortality generally amounts to 9 or 10 per cent. In our own dispensary, during the six years, 1880–1885, 1395 cases were treated with 128 deaths, making a mortality of 9 per cent. Of the fatal cases 73 per cent were under two years of age and 9 per cent under six months of age.”[16]