* * * * *

So thought Nellie, weeping there beside it, all the woman in her aching and yearning for this poor sickly little one.

* * * * *

“It was murdered, murdered as surely as if a rope had been put round its neck and the gallows-trap opened under it; murdered as certainly as though, dying of thirst, it had been denied a sup of water by one who had to spare; murdered, of sure truth, as though in the dark one who knew had not warned it of a precipice in the path.  It had asked so little and had been denied all; only a little air, only a little milk and fruit, only a glimpse of the grass and the trees, even these would have saved it.  And oh!  If also in its languid veins the love-life had bubbled and boiled, if in its bone and flesh a healthy parentage had commingled, if the blood its mother gave it had been hot and red and the milk she suckled it to white and sweet and clean from the fount of vigorous womanhood!  What then?  Then, surely it had been sleeping now with chubby limbs flung wide, its breathing so soft that you had to bend your ear to its red lips to hear it, had been lying wearied with dancing and mischief-making and shouting and toddling and falling, resting the night from a happy to-day till the dawn woke it betime for a happy to-morrow.  All this it should have had as a birthright, with the years stretching in front of it, on through fiery youth, past earnest manhood, to a loved and loving old age.  This is the due, the rightful due, of every child to whom life goes from us.  And that child who is born to sorrow and sordid care, pot-bound from its mother’s womb by encircling conditions that none single-handed can break, is wronged and sinned against by us all most foully.  If it dies we murder it.  If it lives to suffer we crucify it.  If it steals we instigate, despite our canting hypocrisy.  And if it murders we who hang it have beforehand hypnotised its will and armed its hand to slay.”

* * * * *

So Nellie thought, the tears drying on her cheeks, leaning forward to watch the twitching, purpled face of the hard-breathing child.

* * * * *

“Is there not a curse upon us and our people, upon our children and our children’s children, for every little one we murder by our social sins?  Can it be that Nemesis sleeps for us, he who never slept yet for any, he who never yet saw wrong go unavenged or heard the innocent blood cry unanswered from the ground?

“Can it be that he has closed his ears to the dragging footfalls of the harlot host and to the sobs of strong men hopeless and anguished because work is wanting and to the sighing of wearied women and to the death-rattle of slaughtered babes?  Surely though God is not and Humanity is weak yet Nemesis is strong and sleepless and lingers not!  Surely he will tear down the slum and whelm the robbers in their iniquity and visit upon us all punishment for the crime which all alike have shared!  Into the pit which we have left digged for the children of others shall not our own children fall?  Is happiness safe for any while to any happiness is denied?