Theodore Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Russia. 1928

Rubles for striking miners in Wales. Money for propaganda in China, Turkey, Germany, Poland, France, but no money for ragged, cold, homeless babies on the streets or in the vacant cellars.

But what now? What is being done? Always an interpreter to the right and left to inform me. It is a stowaway. Among the bundled and huddled horde at Batum she came "on" as one of the children, slyly holding to some Asiatic mother's skirt, very likely. But now that the crowd is thinning-only four more stops till Odessa-they have found her.

As they carry her down the gangplank, screaming always, I ask other questions: "All right, now that they have found her, what are they going to do with her? Just put her off? She's an orphan child, isn't she? Where does she want to go?"

Wait, I will find out.

Meanwhile the melee has been transferred to the dock. The little thing is fighting to get to the gangplank and so on again. But regularly one of the large, genial sailors is picking her up and carrying her a little way down the dock; shooing her off, as it were. But always as he releases her she eludes him and runs screaming toward the plank. And now the other sailor repeats the process. Only, like so much of all that one comes upon in Russia, it is all so casual. No real excitement in so far as any one else is concerned, passengers or sailors or officers all going their several ways. Some soldiers conversing indifferently on the dock. Stevedores taking up hay, crates of geese, boxes of canned goods. Altogether quite a brisk industrial scene. But here is the child, still screaming and kicking. And the sailors always heading her off or carrying her away again, her ragged little skirts far above her waist, her naked legs exposed to the cold. And one sailor carrying her far down the dock to a gate guarded by soldiers.

The interpreter has returned. "It appears she wants to go to Odessa."

And why? Is there anyone there to receive her?

No, I asked him that. She just wants to go there.

She is a little beggar, isn't she?

Yes.

"But now that she is put off here, what now?" I grow a little irritable and I cannot tell you how sad.

The interpreter continues: "It seems that no one will take charge of her. The captain says he is not allowed to carry her. The company will not allow him. And the different cities do not want him to bring any more in. The Government does not want them transferred from place to place. They are trying to take them up as fast as they can. The captain is sorry-everybody is-but he says that she can beg as well here as in Odessa-that wherever they are they aren't allowed to starve. You see, she isn't exactly thin."

But her life, her health, her outlook, her training! What will she be like when she grows up? You mean to say that not even the police-no society of any kind- will take her up and care for her?

But this is such a problem in Russia. There are so many of them, and they are being taken up. It is due to the war.

Oh, the war be damned! The war was ten years ago. And this child is nine, no more. And what about all the money for propaganda that is being spent everywhere but here for these children?

Source: Theodore Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Russia (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), pp. 242-243.