“The flame of its life had flickered from its birth, had shrunk to a bluish wreathing many a time, had never once leapt upward in a strong red blaze.  Again and again it had lain at its mother’s breast, half-dead; again and again upon its baby face Death had laid the tips of its pinching fingers; again and again it had struggled moaning from the verge of the grave and beaten Lack the grim Destroyer by the patient filling of its tiny lungs.  It wanted so to live, all unconsciously.  The instinct to exist bore it up and with more than Spartan courage stood for it time and again in the well-nigh carried breach.  Now, it was over, the battling, the struggling.  Death loitered by the way but the fight was done.

“The poor little baby!  Poor unknown soldier!  Poor unaided heroic life that was spent at last!  There were none to help it, not one.  In all the world, in all the universe, there was none to give it the air it craved, the food it needed, the living that its baby-soul faded for not having.  It had fought its fight alone.  It lay dying now, unhelped and helpless, forsaken and betrayed.”

* * * * *

So thought Nellie, sitting there beside it, her head thrown back, over her eyes her hands clasped, down her cheeks the tears of passionate pity streaming.

* * * * *

“What had its mother done for it?  The best she could, indeed, but what was that?  The worst she could when she gave it life, when she bore it to choke and struggle and drown in the fetid stream that sweeps the children of the poor from infancy to age; the life she gave it only a flickering, half-lighted life; the blood she gave it thin with her own weariness and vitiate from its drunken sire; the form she gave it soft-boned and angle-headed, more like overgrown embryo than child of the boasted Australian land.  Even the milk it drew from her unwieldy breasts was tainted with city smoke and impure food and unhealthy housing.  Its playground was the cramped kitchen floor and the kerb and the gutter.  Its food for a year had been the food that feeds alike the old and the young who are poor.  All around conspired against it, yet for two years and more it had clung to its life and lived, as if defying Fate, as if the impulse that throbbed in it from the Past laughed at conditions and would have it grow to manhood in spite of all.  In the strength of that impulse, do not millions grow so?  But millions, like this little one, are crushed and overborne.

“It had no chance but the chance that the feeble spark in it gave it.  It had no chance, even with that, to do more than just struggle through.  None came to scatter wide the prison walls of the slum it lived in and give it air.  None came to lift the burden of woe that pressed on all around it and open to it laughter and joy.  None came to stay the robbery of the poor and to give to this brave little baby fresh milk and strengthening food.  In darkness and despair it was born; in darkness and despair it lived; in darkness and despair it died.  To it Death was more merciful than Life.  Yet it was a crime crying for vengeance that we should have let it waste away and die so.”