"It is the tragedy of our whole national life--how these people live
in such times as these. We have not yet gathered the fruits of such an
industrial condition in this country. We have been saved thus far by
reason of the newness of our national life, our vast public lands now
almost exhausted, our great natural resources now fast being seized
and held, but the hour of reckoning will come."
Senator Borah was thinking, doubtless, of open revolution, of
bloodshed and the destruction of property. In a far more terrible
sense, the reckoning which he has referred to is already upon us. The
ills we suffer as the result of the conditions now prevailing in the
United States are appalling in their sum.
It is these conditions that produce the 3,000,000 child laborers of
the United States; child slaves who undergo hardships that blight them
physically and mentally, leaving them fit only to produce human beings
whose deficiencies and misfortunes will exceed their own.
From these same elements, living under these same conditions come the
feebleminded and other defectives. Just how many feebleminded there
are in the United States, no one knows, because no attempt has ever
been made to give public care to all of them, and families are more
inclined to conceal than to reveal the mental defects of their
members.
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