The Alaska citizen., 1912-05-20
The Children of the Poor
 By Eugene V. Debs

the Socialist party as the defender of outraged childhood. The evils of poverty bear most heavily upon the children. The years of infancy are, physically, the most important years of life. Lack of adequate care and nourshment in these years means physical weakness and failure in lat CT life. No single fact in the So cialist indictment of capitalism is more terrible than the excessive nor tality among children Of the working class. In Boston, fer example the death-rate of babies of the poor is nearly two and half times the death rate of the babies of the rich. At least 100000 babies thus needlessly perish each year in the United States. The children of the working class are driven to body and soul destroy ing toil in factories. workshops and mines in order that the children of the rich parasites may play and en- joy the opportunities which a decent society would accord to every child born into the world)
 No fledgling feeds the father bird,
 No chicken feeds the hen,
 No kitten mcuses for the cat
 This glory is for men.
 We are the wisest, strongest race
 Loud may our praise be sung,
 The only animal alive
 That lives upon it's young
 Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
 The wages of vast numbers of workingmen are so small that they and their families are reduced to the barest existence. Life means nothing to them but q hopeless strug- gle which ends only with death. Pov- erty is their lot and misery their heritage. Their sad condition is irrevocably fixed They toll, skimp, worry, suffer, despair and die. There is not much else in the simple an nals of the poor"
 The children of these workingmen. who are pcverty-stricken only be cause they are exploited of what they produce, come into life in an environment and under conditions that almost inevitably predetermine their wretched fate Poverty is their sole inheritance. he cottage in which they are born, unless it chances to be a tenement or a hovel. is limited to the necessities of ex- istence, The walls are bare, the bedding scant the furniture cheap. the food coarse, and the clothing shoddy. The most rigid economy is selfenforced, Life is hard and hopeless here In poverty's breeding pen,
 The father returns after his days exhausting toll to revitalize him. self for the next days slayish task that is all that home means to him. The prisoner of poverty that she is - knows nothing of the joys of home, the ecstacies of motherhood. She is not a mother at all in the sense of which that term is breathed Ill reverence, but only "a female that gives birth to young"
 Love is nGt apt to dwell long in such lair, if it enter here at all And this is the unhappy lot of mil lions of laboring people who are foredoomed to such a bleak and barren existence, and from which there is no escape this side of the grave
 This condition If penury, want and social debasement is fixed and permanent in the existing idustrial system and no amount of maudlin sympathy or patronizing philanthropy Noh hietIeii idliS dlie'ldte us horrors, a fact our dilettante charity ball re- formers unwittingly confess in their favorite and oft-repeated scriptural injunction, The pCor ye have always with you"
 It is under these harsh and gloomy conditions that the children of the poor come into life and are joined to misery at it's very threshold. De- nied all that makes home the haven of love and the abode of joy, depriv- ed of all the sweet influences that fill childhood with rapture, and which the memory treasures in after years like venished dream. these chil- dren of the poor are at their very birth fated to struggle and perish among Les Miserables," the worlds disinherited millions who, robbed of their birthright, are despised for their infirmities and scourged as wantons 0 dishonored graves.
 From the wretched habitations of the poor the children early seek es- cape instead of clinging fondly to their birthplace like fledglings to the parental nest Under the cruel lash of poverty they are driven out into the world in their childhood There is no time for health-giving and bodybuilding recreation and no