Year: 1872

CHANCE FOX TIE CHlLDhEN.


One of the most pathetic and terrible sights
of the days when the late intolerable heat
prevailed was the crowd of sick children and
babies taken up from the foul alleys and slums
during night and early morning to the squares
and even the steps of large public buildings
for a breath of GOODNESS and fresh air In
Philadelphia, the open spaces about the public
drinking fountains offered a resting-place for
them, and the swarms of ragged, diseased
children, many of them actually dying for
want of clear air to breathe, were as potent an
appeal to Christs compassion and that of his
followers as were ever the crowds of impOtent
folk about the pool waiting for the healing
hour 1t was between the hours of four and
seven in the morning when they came, and
then usually attended by their fathers, labOrers
and mechanics of the poorest class. The
women stayed in the miserable homes to
make breakfast ready, and the men gave up
their leisure hour before work to the puny,
dirty children and the inevitable teething
baby, punier and dirtier than ALL yet watched
over with such tender care. By seven o'clock
the spaces were given up to the hurry OF
passage, the men going to their work and the
children driven back by the fierce, intOlerabe
heat to their dens. To how many of them
these miserable shelters were made by the
heat mere openings to DEATH the reports OF
the last two weeks have shown to all of us.


Now, here, it appears to us, is suggestion
and a plan for charity where a less amount of
money expended would produce. more actual
benefit than almost any other. The cities are
filed with costly asylums and hospitals where
literally millions of dollars are spent to benefit
certain permanently helpless classes. The ex-
penditfre is steady and incessant; i'll the ma
iority of cases simple relief and not cure of
suffering is attained. On the other
hand. here are thousands of naturally
healthy children in New-York and Philadel-
phia who have died in the last three weeks from
temporary ailments which fresh, pure air
would have cured, and the comparative pit
tance needed to give them that breath of air
could not be obtained. No endowment, nor
massive building with a costly appanage of
nurses and superintendents is necessary.
Three weeks stay in the country air is usually
all that is needed for any child dying of the
diseases induced by teething or heat A large
building rented and opened for the three
Summer months in the mountains or by the sea,
within few hours of New-York the plain
est food and lodgings consOnant with health,
are all that is needed to save unnumbered
lives. Another plan which suggests itself is that
of the Cottage Hospitals lately so successfully
tried in England. These are small buildings
in suburban and village communities, where
are but one nurse doctor and three or four
patients, in lieu of the great army of attend
ants, and the necessary, but appalling machine
work of great hospitals. They are found to
answer the purpose i'll every respect more
fully, as they approach nearer to the system
and temper of home. Besides, they are said
to come under the patronage and individual
care Of private citizens, as the monster asylums
cannot do.


A plan of this kind might easily be modi-
fed before next Summer SO as to give the
perishing children a chance for their lives.
Even now it is not too late. The hot weather
is not more than half over, and although con-
certed action may not be attainable there are
no men or women of wealth who have it not in
their power to save human life to-day if they
will. Charity and Imagination and resolve
grow languid and drowsy under such heat as
this, but if any woman wants a great thought
to refresh her, let her go in the early light of
the sickly morning and pick out the puniest
child who is clinging to life most desperately,
and give it breath of salt air or sight of
green meadows. By next Summer she will
have 80 moved the hearts of all good women
with her story that our city shall not again
be disgraced with the wholesale murder of the
month just past.