, 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."

* * * * *

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