Chapter V: Blossoms and Babies 263 (3)

A TYPICAL “LITTLE MOTHER”
]

“‘Now, Tony, wouldn’t you like to have a good breakfast every morning,—some hot coffee and nice rolls?’

“‘Yes, mum.’

“‘Well, do you know the Salvation Army where they give breakfasts to little boys who need them?’

“‘Yes, mum.’

“‘Well, if I get you a ticket, won’t you go there to-morrow and get your breakfast?’

“The little fellow’s eyes flashed and he looked straight at me and said, ‘No, mum, I don’t want it.’ Really, I admired his spirit. Poor as he was, he did not want charity.”

Better than any argument the principal’s own words show the cruel, inquisitorial method and its effectiveness in suppressing the truth. I repeat, that was the method of inquiry generally adopted, and it was upon reports based upon the results of such examinations that the special committee of the Board of Education based its report.

V

Of course, not all teachers are so tactless. A very large number are merely unobservant, possibly because they have become inured to the pitiful appearance of the children and their painfully low physical development. It is common to hear teachers in poor districts say: “When I first came to this school my heart used to ache with pity on account of the poverty-stricken appearance of many of the children and the sad tales they sometimes tell. But now I have grown used to it all.” That, in many cases, tells the whole secret—they have grown accustomed to the sight of stunted bodies and wan, pinched faces. There are teachers, earnest men and women devoted to their profession, and consecrating it by an almost religious passion, who study the home life and social environment of the children intrusted to their care; but they are, unhappily, exceptions. The number of teachers having no idea of how a healthy child should look is astonishingly large. The hectic flush of disease is often mistaken by teachers and principals for the bloom of health.

In one large school the principal, in the course of a personally conducted visit to the different classrooms, singled out a little Italian girl, and asked with a note of pride in his voice: “Wouldn’t you call this a healthy child? I do. Look at her round, full face.” There were a great many signs of ill health in that little girl’s appearance which the good principal did not recognize. I pointed out some of the signs of grave nervous disorder, due, as I afterward learned, almost beyond question, to malnutrition. Her cheeks were well rounded, but her pitifully thin arms indicated a very ill-developed body. I pointed out her nervous hand, the baggy fulness under her eyes, and the abrasions at the corners of her twitching mouth,[46] and asked that the teacher might be consulted as to the girl’s school record. “She is not a very bright child,” said the teacher, “and what to do with her is a problem. She is very nervous, irritable, and excitable. She seems to get exhausted very soon, and it is impossible for her to apply herself properly to her work. I think very likely that she is underfed, for she comes from a very poor home.” Subsequent investigation at her home, on Mott Street, showed that her father, who is a consumptive, earns from sixty cents to a dollar a day peddling laces, needles, and other small articles, the rest of the income supporting the family of seven persons being derived from the mother’s labor. They occupy one small room, and the only means of cooking they have is a small gas “ring” such as is sold for ten cents in the cheap stores.

Where principals and teachers declined to assist, it was impossible to make inquiries in the schools, and it was useless to make them in schools where the children had already been openly questioned. Wherever it was possible to secure the coöperation of principals or teachers, I got them to question the children privately and sympathetically. In 16 schools, 12,800 children were thus privately examined, and of that number 987, or 7.71 per cent, were reported as having had no breakfast upon the day of the inquiry, and 1963, or 15.32 per cent, as having had altogether too little. Teachers were asked to exclude as far as possible all cases of an obviously accidental nature from the returns, as, for instance, when a child known to be in fairly comfortable circumstances had come to school without breakfast merely because of lack of appetite. They were also requested to regard as having had inadequate breakfasts only children who had had bread only (with or without tea or coffee), or such things as crackers or crullers in place of bread, but without milk, cereals, cake, butter, jam, eggs, fruit, fish, or meat of any kind. That this standard was altogether too low will probably be admitted without question, but there was no way of examining the actual meals of the children, and some sort of arbitrary rule was necessary. The figures given are therefore based on a very low standard, and most certainly do not include all cases either of the unfed or underfed. It is more than probable that some children who had gone without breakfasts refused to admit the fact, and there were several instances in which children known to be desperately poor, and who, the teachers felt, were certainly underfed, gave the most surprising accounts—which must have been drawn from their imaginations[47]—of elaborate breakfasts. Out of 12,800 children, then, 2950, or more than 23 per cent, were found either wholly breakfastless or having had such miserably poor breakfasts as described. And that is certainly an understatement of the evil of underfeeding in those schools.

One of the most notable of these school investigations was undertaken by the principal of a large school to “prove conclusively that really there is no such thing as a serious problem of underfeeding among our school children.” The principal is a devoted believer in the theory of the survival of the fittest, and in the elimination of the weak by competition and struggle. “If you attempt to take hardship and suffering out of their lives by smoothing the pathway of life for these children, you weaken their character, and, by so doing, you sin against the children themselves and, through them, against society,” he said. With the view of Huxley and others that the real interest and duty of society is to make as many as possible fit to survive, he expressed himself as having no sympathy, on the ground that it conflicts with nature’s immutable law of struggle. But, as often happens, his deeds frequently run counter to his merciless creed, and he is one of the most generous and compassionate of men. The children trust him, and the sense of an intimate friendship between him and them is the most delightful impression the visitor receives. There is no absence of real, effective discipline, but it is discipline based upon sympathy, friendship, and trust. The principal declared that he did not believe that 5 children could be found in the whole school of 1500 who could be described as badly underfed, or who came to school breakfastless.

The district in which this school is situated is one of the poorest in the city, the population consisting almost exclusively of Italians. Most of the men are unskilled laborers working for very low wages and irregularly employed. Many of them are recent immigrants and subject to the vicious padrone system. Every fresh batch of immigrants intensifies the already keen and brutal competition, and to maintain even the low standard of living to which they are accustomed, the wives frequently work as wage-earners. The people are housed in vile tenements, and the crowding of two families into one small room is by no means uncommon. “Little mothers” and their rickety infant charges crowd the pavements. In the early morning, even during the winter months, groups of shivering children gather outside the school waiting for admission hours before the time of opening, and at lunch time instead of going to their homes they hasten away with their pennies and nickels to buy ice cream, pickles, peppers, or cream puffs for their midday meal. Knowing these to be the conditions existing in the neighborhood, it was impossible to accept the optimistic views of the principal without serious questioning, and it was to convince me that he was right that he undertook to have the investigation made while we went over the school.

The teachers were requested to examine every child privately, and to report the number of children having had no breakfast that morning and the number having had inadequate breakfasts. Some of the teachers absolutely refused to ask the children “such questions,” and two or three sent in obstinately stupid reports such as “nobody underfed but the teacher.” Reports were received from 19 classes with an actual attendance of 865 children, of which number 104 were reported as having had no breakfast and 54 as having had too little. Not all the reports were of equal value, I afterward found, some of the teachers having ignored the rule and regarded coffee and bread as sufficient. In one case there were three children who declared that they had only cold coffee without any food. They should have been reported as breakfastless, but in fact they were not reported in either column. So that it is probable that in this case also the figures given are an understatement of actual conditions. In one class of 43 children 13 were reported as having had no breakfast and 12 as having had insufficient, and when the report was sent back with instructions that the teacher try to find out _why_ the 13 children had no breakfast, it was returned with the postscript in the teacher’s handwriting, “There was no food for them to eat.” In another class out of 65 children no less than 30 were reported as having had no breakfast, but of these 12 had had either tea or coffee. As they did not have food of any kind other than the tea or coffee, the teacher reported them as breakfastless. Making all allowances for discrepancies and differences of value in the teachers’ reports, it is surely most serious that no less than 17.81 per cent of the children examined should be reported as either breakfastless or very inadequately fed that day. It should be said that this inquiry took place in the winter, the season when there is most unemployment among unskilled laborers, and it is not probable that the same amount of poverty would be found all the year round.

One incident in connection with the investigation in this school is worthy of record. A lad of about 13 or 14 years of age in one of the highest grades, who had been reported as having had no breakfast, was seen in the principal’s office at noon. He seemed to be quite rugged and healthy, and the principal said that he was “the brightest boy in the school, and a good lad, too.” He showed us his lunch—a roll of bread and two small pieces of almost transparent cheese. “Isn’t that enough for a boy?” asked the principal, laughingly. The boy responded: “Yes, but I had no breakfast, and this has to do me all day. I don’t have any breakfast most times, and sometimes no lunch or supper. You know that Mr. B—— used to give me some very often.” And the principal confirmed this part of the lad’s story with a tender, “Yes, I know, sonny.” The boy told us a saddening story of a mother cowed down by a brutal husband, and of the latter’s vice. He is a cook and has often beaten his wife, who works in an embroidery factory. A year or so ago he went to Italy, leaving his wife here. Soon afterward he wrote to her for money to pay his passage back. She was penniless, but, the lad quaintly said, “she made a debt of a hundred dollars” to send to him. “Then she had to pay every week, and there wasn’t much food.” The rest of his tale of shame—shame of a father’s sin—need not be told. It is too horrible. “Why doesn’t your mother leave him and just take you with her? You are the only child, aren’t you?” asked the principal. “Yes, I’m the only one, but there are ten dead,” was the boy’s startling reply. It was, unconsciously, a significant comment upon the good principal’s theory of the survival of the fittest.

In another school the principal told me that she had reported to the District Superintendent that of 1000 children on the register at least 100 were badly underfed. She told of children fainting in school or in the yard from lack of food, and of others suffering from disorders of the bowels due to the same cause. Many of these children were pointed out in the course of several visits to the school. “Ignorance plays a large part in the problem,” said the principal, “but I think it is mostly poverty. When work is hard to get, or there is sickness in the family, or when there is a strike, then the children suffer most, and that shows that it is poverty in most cases.” Upon one of my visits to this school, I encountered one of those pathetic incidents of which I have gathered so many in the course of these investigations. Little Patsey, the American-born child of Irish parents, had for some days been ailing and unable to attend properly to his lessons. The teacher suspected that improper food was the cause, and Patsey’s account of his diet confirmed her in that opinion. So she advised Patsey to tell his mother that oatmeal would be better for him. “Get oatmeal, Patsey, it’s better—and very cheap, too.” There were tears in the principal’s eyes as she told how, that very morning, the teacher had found what she supposed to be powdered chalk upon the floor and was about to scold the culprit, when she discovered that it was Patsey’s oatmeal! _Poor little Patsey had for three days been spending his daily lunch allowance of three cents upon oatmeal and eating it dry. Teacher had said that it was better!_ Only the thought of the teacher’s influence, and the hope that through the medium of such influence as hers it may be possible to dispel much of the ignorance of which so many children are the victims, relieves the pathos of the incident and brightens it.

VI

Soon after the foregoing investigations were made, Dr. H. M. Lechstrecker, of the New York State Board of Charities, conducted an examination of 10,707 children in the Industrial Schools of New York City. He found that 439, or 4.10 per cent, had had no breakfast on the date of the inquiry, while 998, or 9.32 per cent, exhibited anæmic conditions apparently due to lack of proper nourishment. Upon investigation the teachers found that the breakfasts of each of the 998 consisted either of coffee only, or of coffee with bread only. Only 1855, or 17.32 per cent, started the day with what Dr. Lechstrecker considered to be an adequate meal.[48] Other independent inquiries in several cities show that the problem is by no means peculiar to New York.

In Buffalo the principal of one large school, Mr. Charles L. Ryan, is reported as saying that of the 1500 children in his school at least one-tenth come to school in the morning without breakfast. In 8 schools in Buffalo, having a total average attendance of 7500 pupils, the principals estimated that 350, or 4.46 per cent, have no breakfasts at all, and that 800 more have too little to insure effective work. No less than 5105 of the 7500 children were reported as having tea or coffee with bread only.[49] It is rather difficult to analyze these figures satisfactorily, but it would appear that no less than 17.33 per cent of the total number of children in these 8 schools are believed by the principals and teachers to be appreciably handicapped by defective nutrition, and that only 16.80 per cent are adequately and satisfactorily fed.

In Chicago several independent investigations have been made. Mr. William Hornbaker, principal of the Oliver Goldsmith school, says: “We have here 1100 children in a district which is so crowded that all our pupils come from an area comprising only about twenty acres. When I began work here, I discovered that many of the pupils remained all day without food. A great majority of the parents in this district, as well as the older children, are at work from dawn to dusk, and have no time to care for the little ones. Such children have no place to go when dismissed at noon.”[50] At this school a lunch room has been established, and two meals a day are provided for about 50 of the most necessitous children. At first these meals were sold at a penny per meal, but it was found that even pennies were too hard to obtain. Mr. Hornbaker points out that the pride of the larger children restrains them, and it is most difficult to get them to admit their hunger, but the younger children are not so sensitive. He says that “unquestionably a majority of the children are improperly fed, especially in the lower grades.” Out of a total attendance of 5150 children in 5 Chicago schools 122 were reported as breakfastless, 1464 as having only bread with coffee or tea, a total of 30.79 per cent.[51]

In Philadelphia several inquiries were made, with the result that of 4589 children 189 were reported as going generally or often without breakfast of any kind, while 2504 began the day on coffee or tea and bread, a total of 58.52 per cent.[52] In Cleveland, Boston, and Los Angeles, among many other cities, teachers and others declare that the evil is quite as extensive.

Massing the figures given from New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Chicago, we get a total of 40,746 children examined, of which number 14,121, or 34.65 per cent, either went breakfastless to school or got miserably poor breakfasts of bread and tea or coffee. At least bread and tea must prove to be a poor diet, wholly insufficient to meet the demands of a growing human body, and the difficulty of obtaining good, wholesome bread in our cities intensifies the evil. The wholesale adulteration of food is indeed a most serious menace to life and health to which the poor are constantly subjected.

These figures are not put forward as being in any sense a statistical measure of the problem. The investigations described, and others of a like nature, afford no adequate basis for scientific estimates. They are all confined to the one morning meal, and the standard adopted for judging of the adequateness of the meals given to the children is necessarily crude and lacking in scientific precision. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that it is not a question of whether so many children go without breakfast occasionally, but whether they are _underfed_, either through missing meals more or less frequently or through feeding day by day and week by week upon food that is poor in quality, unsuitable, and of small nutritive value, and whether in consequence the children suffer physically or mentally, or both. Only a comprehensive examination by experts of a large number of children in different parts of the country, a careful inquiry into their diet and their physical and mental development, would afford a satisfactory basis for any statistical measure of the problem which could be accepted as even approximately correct. Yet such inquiries as those described cannot be ignored; in the absence of more comprehensive and scientific investigations they are of great value, on account of the mass of observed facts which they give; and the results certainly tend to show that the estimate that fully 2,000,000 children of school age in the United States are badly underfed is not exaggerated.

VII

As stated, all the investigations described were confined to the breakfast meal. There has been practically no effort made, so far as I am aware, to determine how many children there are who go without lunches back to their lessons, or, what is quite as important, how many there are to whom are given small sums of money to procure lunches for themselves; and what kind of lunches they buy. Even in Europe most of the investigations made have been confined to the morning meal. Yet this lunch question is probably even more important than the other. There are doubtless many more children who go without lunch than without breakfast. Thousands of children who get some sort of breakfast, even if it is only coffee and bread, get nothing at all for lunch, and a still larger number—in some schools I have found as many as 20 per cent—get small sums of money, ranging from one to five cents, to buy lunches for themselves. And in most cases the condition of these is just as deplorable as if they had nothing at all, if not much worse. Their tragedy lies in the fact that in most cases the money they spend would be quite sufficient to provide decent, nourishing meals if it were wisely spent, instead of which they get what is positively injurious.

When a child of eight or nine years of age whose breakfast consists of tea and bread lunches day after day upon pickles, its digestive system must of necessity be impaired. Wise discrimination cannot be expected from young children, and the temptation of the candy stores and of the push carts laden with ice cream or fruit is great. Often the fact that children in the very poorest districts spend so many pence is urged as evidence that no serious problem of poverty exists, but that is a wholly unwarranted assumption. There may not be absolute destitution; the family income may be sufficient to keep its members above the line of primary poverty, but the conditions under which it is earned, necessitating the employment of the mother, involve the suffering of the children. The mother is taken away from her legitimate work, the care of her home and children, and they are left to their own resources. In the course of these investigations I have found hundreds of children going back to their lessons without having had any lunch, and hundreds more of the class just described. In one class of 40 in an East Side school I found 11 with pennies to buy their own lunches. These children were all between the ages of eight and ten years. In another school the principal said that there were 50 such children known to her out of a total of less than 500. In 4 other schools, with an attendance of 4500, the principals’ estimates of the number of such children aggregated 521, or 11.51 per cent.

This phase of the problem of child hunger is not peculiar to New York. The reports of teachers in many cities and towns and my own observations show that this evil is invariably associated with poverty; and European investigations all support that view.[53] It is probable that in some of the smaller manufacturing towns it prevails to a larger proportional extent than in cities like New York, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis, but of that matter there are no data. The answers of teachers and others to inquiries as to what such children buy have been monotonously alike. They buy candy, cream puffs, ice cream, fruit (very often damaged, decayed, or unripe), pickles, and other unwholesome things. One cold day last winter I visited the neighborhood of a large school with an idea that it might be possible to ascertain just exactly what a number of children would buy for lunch. Any one who has ever watched the outpouring of children from a large school will realize how utterly impossible it is to keep any considerable number of them under observation. Like a great river that has broken its banks the human torrent rushes through the streets and crowds them awhile, then spreads far and wide. I found 14 children in a delicatessen store, 8 boys and 6 girls. Seven of them bought pickles and bread; 4 bought pickles only; 2 bought bologna sausage and rye bread, and 1 bought pickled fish and bread. In a neighboring street I made similar observations one day during the summer. Out of 19 children 8 bought pickles, 2 of them with bread, the others without; 6 bought ice cream, 2 bought bananas, and 3 others bought candy. For the children of the poor there seems to be some strange fascination about pickles. One lad of ten said that he always bought pickles with his three cents. “I must have pickles,” he said. It would seem that the chronic underfeeding creates a nervous craving for some kind of a stimulant which the child finds in pickles. The adult resorts to whiskey very often for much the same reason. There is every reason to believe that this malnutrition lays the foundation for inebriety in later years. The custom of giving the children money instead of prepared lunches is also responsible for a good deal of gambling, especially among the boys. Little Tony plays “craps” and loses his lunch, and the boy who wins gets a particularly big unwholesome “blow out,” or adds a packet of cigarettes to his meal of pickles or cream puffs.

In one large school on the West Side the principal confidently declared that 10 per cent would be altogether too low an estimate of the number of badly underfed children in that school. “If you mean only the breakfastless ones,” she said, “why, it is too high, but if you include those whose breakfasts are totally inadequate, and those who have no lunches, those whose lunches at home are as inadequate as their breakfasts, and those who get only the bad things they buy for lunch—in a word, if you include all who suffer on account of defective, low nutrition, the estimate of 10 per cent is too low for this school. There are whole blocks in this district from which we scarcely get a child who is not, at some time or other in the course of a year, in want of food. The worst cases are in the primary grades, for many of the older children drop out. The boys find odd jobs to do, and the girls are needed at home to care for the smaller children.” The population of this district is largely Irish and most of the men belong to that class of unskilled laborers which, more than any other industrial class, suffers from irregularity of employment. Many are longshoremen, others are truck-men, builders’ laborers, and so on. No other class of workers suffers so much from what may be called accidental causes as this. A war in some far-away land may for a while seriously divert the stream of commerce, and the longshoreman of New York suffers unemployment and its attendant poverty; a strike of bricklayers or carpenters will throw the laborers and their families into the maws of all-devouring misery, or a week of bad weather may cause inexpressible hardship. When employment is steady the wages they receive are in most cases only sufficient to keep their families just above the line of poverty; when there is sickness or unemployment, even for a couple of weeks, there is privation and the growth of a burden of debt which remains to crush them downward when wages begin to come in again. Want actually continues in such cases through what, judged by the wage standard, appears to be a time of normal prosperity. It is hardly to be wondered at that there is a good deal of intemperance and improvidence. These conditions are the economic soil in which intemperance, thriftlessness, and irresponsibility flourish.

In this district, with the coöperation of a well-trained and experienced woman investigator, a careful investigation of the condition of 50 families represented in the school was made. The number of children attending school from the 50 families was 79. Of that number there were 24 who had no breakfast of any kind on the days they were visited, while of the 55 more fortunate ones no less than 30 had only bread with tea or coffee. Only 35 of the children had any lunch, or money with which to procure any, 44 missing that meal entirely. Terrible as they are, these figures do not tell the whole story. It is impossible to appreciate what going without lunch means to these children unless we take into account the fact that those who go without lunch, and those who eat only the deleterious things they buy, are in most cases the same children who either go breakfastless or have only bread and coffee day after day. And their evening meal is very often a repetition of the morning meal, bread and coffee or tea. From the schedule showing the actual dietary of the children in question contained in the report of my co-investigator I give, in the following table, the particulars relating to 6 families. They are perfectly typical cases and demonstrate very clearly the woful inadequacy of diet common to children of the poor.

════════╤════════╤═════════════════╤═════════════════╤═════════════════
Family │ No. of │ Breakfast │ Lunch │ Supper
│ School │ │ │
│Children│ │ │
────────┼────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────
1 │ 2 │Bread and tea │None. │Bread and tea.
│ │ only. │ │
2 │ 1 │None. │Soup from │Coffee and bread.
│ │ │ charity. │
3 │ 1 │Coffee and rolls │Coffee and bread.│Tea and bread.
│ │ (no butter or │ │
│ │ jam). │ │
4 │ 3 │Bread and tea │None. │Bread and tea
│ │ only. │ │ only.
5 │ 2 │None. │Soup with the │Piece of bread.
│ │ │ soup-meat. │
6 │ 1 │Bread and jam │None. │Tea and bread
│ │ with coffee. │ │ with jam.
════════╧════════╧═════════════════╧═════════════════╧═════════════════

It is a horrible fact that many of these children whose diet is so unwholesome cannot eat decent food, even when they are most hungry. It is not merely a question of appetite, but of stomachs too weak by reason of chronic hunger and malnutrition to stand good and nutritious food. This has been frequently observed in connection with Fresh Air Outings for poor children in the tenement districts. I have known scores of instances. Very often these children have to be patiently taught to eat. Sometimes it takes several days to induce them to take milk and eggs. They crave for their accustomed food—coffee and bread, or pickles. The same fact has been observed in connection with adults in the hospitals. When the Salvation Army started its free breakfast stations in New York, the newspapers made a good deal of the fact that the children refused to eat the good soup and milk porridge at first provided. That was regarded as conclusive evidence that they were not hungry, for a hungry child is supposed to eat almost anything. That is true in a measure of children who are merely hungry, but these children are more than hungry. They are weak and unhealthy as the result of chronic underfeeding. I myself saw many children at the Salvation Army free breakfast depots whose hunger was only too apparent try bravely to eat the soup until they actually vomited. They would beg for a piece of bread, and when it was given them eat it ravenously. In an uptown school a little English boy fainted one morning while at his lessons. He had fainted the day before in the school yard, but the teacher thought that it was due to overexertion while at play. When he fainted the second time she took him to the principal’s office, and they discovered that he had not eaten anything that day, and only a piece of bread the day before. The principal sent for some milk, and when it was warmed in the school kitchen she gave it to the lad with a couple of dainty chicken sandwiches from her own lunch, expecting him to enjoy a rare treat. But he didn’t. He took only a bite or two and a sup of milk, then began to vomit. He could not be induced to eat any more nor even to drink the milk. Presently, however, he said to the teacher, “I think I could eat some bread, teacher,” and when they sent out for some rolls and coffee he ate as though he had seen no food for a week. Very few people, it may be added, incidentally, realize how much the teachers and principals of schools in the poorest districts give out of their slender incomes to provide children with food, clothing, and shoes. But how little it all amounts to in the way of solving the problem is best expressed in the words of one principal, “What I can give in that way to the worst cases only lessens the evil in just the same degree as a handful of sands taken from the seashore lessens the number of grains.”

A COSMOPOLITAN GROUP OF “FRESH AIR FUND” CHILDREN
]

VIII

The physical effects of such underfeeding cannot be easily overestimated. No fact has been more thoroughly established than the physical superiority of the children of the well-to-do classes over their less fortunate fellows. In Moscow, N.V. Zark, a famous Russian authority, found that at all ages the boys attending the Real schools and the Classical Gymnasium are superior in height and weight to peasant boys.[54] In Leipzic, children paying 18 marks school fees are superior in height and weight to those paying only 9, and gymnasium boys are superior to those of the lower Real and Burger schools.[55] Studies in Stockholm and Turin show the same general results, the poorer children being invariably shorter, lighter, and smaller of chest. The British Anthropometric Committee found that English boys at ten in the Industrial Schools were 3.31 inches shorter and 10.64 pounds lighter than children of the well-to-do classes, while at fourteen years the differences in height and weight were 6.65 inches and 21.85 pounds, respectively.[56] Dr. Charles W. Roberts gives some striking results of the examination of 19,846 English boys and men.[57] Of these, 5915 belong to the non-laboring classes of the English population, namely, public school boys, naval and military cadets, medical and university students. The remaining 13,931 belong to the artisan class. The difference in height, weight, and chest girth, from thirteen to sixteen years of age, is as follows:—

AVERAGE HEIGHT IN INCHES

═══════════════════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤═══════════ Age │ 13 │ 14 │ 15 │ 16 ───────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────── Non-laboring class │ 58.79│ 61.11│ 63.47│ 66.40 Artisan class │ 55.93│ 57.76│ 60.58│ 62.93 ───────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────── Difference │ 2.66│ 3.35│ 2.89│ 3.47 ═══════════════════════╧═══════════╧═══════════╧═══════════╧═══════════

AVERAGE WEIGHT IN POUNDS

═══════════════════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤═══════════ Age │ 13 │ 14 │ 15 │ 16 ───────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────── Non-laboring class │ 88.60│ 99.21│ 110.42│ 128.34 Artisan class │ 78.27│ 84.61│ 96.79│ 108.70 ───────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────── Difference │ 10.33│ 14.60│ 13.63│ 19.64 ═══════════════════════╧═══════════╧═══════════╧═══════════╧═══════════

AVERAGE CHEST GIRTH IN INCHES

═══════════════════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤═══════════ Age │ 13 │ 14 │ 15 │ 16 ───────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────── Non-laboring class │ 28.41│ 29.65│ 30.72│ 33.08 Artisan class │ 25.24│ 26.28│ 27.51│ 28.97 ───────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────── Difference │ 3.17│ 3.37│ 3.21│ 4.11 ═══════════════════════╧═══════════╧═══════════╧═══════════╧═══════════

It will be seen, therefore, that the children of the non-laboring class at thirteen years of age exceed those of the artisan class in height almost three inches, in weight almost ten and a half pounds, and in chest girth almost three and a quarter inches. And these figures by no means represent fully the contrast in physique which exists between the very poorest and well-to-do children. The difference between the children of the best-paid artisans and the poorest-paid of the same class is nearly as great. Mr. Rowntree found that in York, England, the boys of the poorest section of the working-class were on an average three and one-half inches shorter than the boys of the better-paid section of the working-class. As regards weight Mr. Rowntree found the difference to be eleven pounds in favor of the child of the best-paid artisan.[58]

Dr. W.W. Keen quotes the figures of Roberts with approval as applying almost equally to this country,[59] and all the studies yet made by American investigators seem to justify that opinion. There exists a somewhat voluminous, but scattered, American literature tending to the same general conclusions as the European. The classic studies of Dr. Bowditch,[60] in Boston, and Dr. Porter,[61] in St. Louis, showed very distinctly that the children of the poorer classes in those cities were decidedly behind those of the well-to-do classes in both height and weight. The more recent investigations of Dr. Hrdlicka[62] fully bear out the results of these earlier studies.

The Report on Physical Training (Scotland) calls attention once more to the fact that children in the pauper, reformatory, and industrial schools are superior in physique to the children in the ordinary elementary schools. Says the report: “The contrast between the condition of such children as are seen in the poor day schools and the children of parents who have altogether failed in their duty is both marked and painful.”[63] Commenting upon which an English Socialist writer says: “The obvious deduction is that if you are doing your duty ... and your children are brought up in the way they should go, they will not be half as well off as if they were truants or thieves. Therefore, ... the best thing you can do for them ... is to turn your children into little criminals.”[64] Without accepting these cynical deductions, the fact remains that in a great many instances those children who, by reason of the criminality of their parents or their complete failure to provide for their offspring, find their way into such institutions, are far better off, physically, than their fellows in the ordinary schools whose parents are careful and industrious. But for the taint of institutional life, and the crushing out of individuality which almost invariably accompanies it, they would be far better equipped for the battle of life.

The real significance of this physical superiority is not so obvious as the writer quoted appears to assume. The fact is that these children are generally below the average even of their own class when they are admitted to these institutions. Their superior physique shows the regeneration which proper food and hygienic conditions produce in the worst cases.

IX

More than two thousand years ago Aristotle pointed out that physical health was the basis of mental health, and the importance of a sound physical development as an essential condition of successful education. “First the body must be trained and _then_ the understanding,” declared the great Stagirite. The “new spirit” of modern education is admirably expressed in the Aristotelian maxim. This new spirit is a protest against the practice, futile from the standpoint of society, and brutal from the standpoint of the child, of attempting to educate hungry, physically weak, and ill-developed children who are unfitted to bear the strain and effort involved in the educational process. No one who has studied the matter at all can doubt that the physical deterioration which accompanies the impoverishment of the workers is of tremendous significance educationally. All the evidence gathered upon the subject in Europe and this country tends to the conclusion that physical weakness and underdevelopment account for a very large percentage of our educational failures. The studies of Porter, in St. Louis, Smedley and Christopher, in Chicago, and of Professor Beyer, who is perhaps our greatest authority, all tend to confirm the results of European investigations, that children of superior physique make the best pupils. Dull, backward pupils are generally inferior in physical development.[65]

The number of dull and backward children in our public schools is so great that a study from this physiological point of view would seem to be quite as desirable and important as the many exhaustive and valuable psychological studies with which the literature of Child Study abounds. For many years special tutorial methods and institutions have existed for idiot and feeble-minded children and such other classes of distinctly defective children as epileptics, the blind, the deaf, and the dumb. But it is only in recent years that any effort has been made to deal with that far larger class of children distinguished equally from these distinctly defective classes and from normal, typical children. These pseudo-atypical children, as Dr. Groszmann terms them, are much more numerous than is generally supposed. Professor Monroe, of Stanford University, gathered particulars relating to 10,000 children in the public schools of California and found that 3 per cent of the children were feeble-minded and not less than 10 per cent backward and mentally dull, needing special care and attention.[66] These children who “skirt the borderland of abnormity” cannot properly be dealt with in the ordinary classes, and it has been found necessary in most cities to establish special classes for their benefit. While some of these classes have children whose backwardness is more apparent than real, the children of foreign immigrants, for example, whose difficulties with the language cause them to be placed in grades with much younger children, the problem is still serious when all possible allowance has been made for these. In districts where the number of foreign-born children is very small the percentage of backward children is very great. The percentage found in the schools of California by Professor Monroe is probably not too high for the country as a whole. In a general way it corroborates the findings of European investigators, and a number of educators to whom I submitted the question have given estimates based upon their personal observations ranging from 10 to 15 per cent.

If we accept the California figures and apply them to the whole country, we get a total of about 1,500,000 such children enrolled in the public schools, for not more than one-fourth of whom has any special provision been made or attempted. The seriousness of this aspect of the problem will be apparent to teachers and others familiar with school work who know how seriously 1 or 2 such children in a class of 40 or 50 will impair the efficiency of the teacher’s efforts. By reason of their dulness and slow mental action such children absorb too much of the teacher’s time, which might more profitably be spent upon other children, and thus act as a drag upon all the members of the class.

Moreover, they become discouraged by their failures, and, hardened by constant rebuke and the taunts of their brighter companions, finally careless, defiant, and altogether incorrigible. In many cases they leave school before they are of the legal age, their leaving welcomed, and often suggested, by the teachers, who not unnaturally tire of the hindrance to their work. Yet they are the very children who can least of all afford to miss whatever education they are capable of. They, more than any others, need the training and development of their minds to fit them for the battle of life. How can they otherwise be expected to earn their daily bread in the competitive labor market, where dulness of brain must inevitably prove a serious handicap? And unless they can stand the test of that competition, they must become paupers. Many of these children are taken away from school and sent to work, because, their parents say, “they can’t learn and are better helping to pay the rent than wasting their time in school.” In connection with the movement for the prevention of child labor, we have come across hundreds of instances of this kind. Factory inspectors and physicians in industrial centres where child labor is prevalent have frequently pointed out that a very large number of child workers are quite unfit for work. They were sick and backward in school, and instead of that special care being given them which their condition demanded in order that they might be equipped for the struggle for existence, they were removed altogether from the school’s influences and subjected to conditions which tend to further deterioration, physical, mental, and moral.[67]

So that the problem is not merely one of economic waste represented by a fruitless and vain expenditure for the education of children who are not capable of benefiting by it. It is not merely a question of economic waste added to educational failure and the peril to society which that failure must involve in the crime which ignorance breeds and fosters. All these things are involved, and, in addition to them, is involved the terrible fact that we turn them adrift in the world, unfit for its service and unable to adjust themselves to its needs. In the very nature of things, because they are ill developed of body and mind, they must become industrially inefficient. They sink from depth to depth in the industrial abyss,

“To endure wrongs darker than death or night.”

Where giant machines, inventors’ brains, and ambitious immigrants in countless numbers all conspire to narrow the labor market, they are ruthlessly thrust aside. They are not only unemployed but unemployable. They become paupers, driven into the morass of pauperism by forces that are practically, for them, irresistible. Thus is the problem of pauperism perpetuating itself. And to the economic waste represented by the expenditure upon them in the schools must be added the further cost of their support as dependants and paupers. It is a vicious circle.

X

That these same conditions are a fruitful source of criminality is unquestionable. All our studies of juvenile delinquency point to the fact that a very large proportion of the children who become truants, moral perverts, and criminals are drawn from this same class of physically degenerate children. It is commonplace nowadays to say that many of our criminals are not really criminals at all, but the victims of physical or mental abnormalities, often directly traceable to low nutrition. In observing a number of juvenile delinquents the proportion of ill-developed children is generally noticeable. Professor G. Stanley Hall says, “Juvenile criminals, as a class, are inferior in body and mind to normal children, and ... their social environment is no less inferior.”[68] Professor Dawson found among boys and girls in reformatory institutions a tendency to lighter weight, shorter stature, and less strength of grip; 16 per cent of them being “clearly sufferers from low nutrition.”[69] Professor Kline has shown the same general condition in a striking study, and concludes that “low nutrition breeds discontent and a tendency to run away.”[70] A mass of very similar testimony might be cited from the records of the most competent investigators in this and other countries. It is the universal experience that a low standard of physical development is almost invariably associated with low mental and moral standards.

It is no mere coincidence that inferiority of physique should be thus universally and inseparably associated with inferiority of economic condition. It is not a mere coincidence that superiority of physique should be generally associated with mental superiority. Nor will the suggestion of coincidence suffice to explain the universal association of low physical and mental development with criminal propensities. These facts possess a very definite, and very obvious, relation as cause and effect. The three main divisions of degeneracy, physical, mental, and moral, are inseparable and spring from the same causes. From the investigations which have been made in this country and from the voluminous literature upon the subject which similar investigations in European countries have produced, I am satisfied that poor, defective nutrition lies at the root of the physical degeneration of the poor; and _a priori_ reasoning would justify the conclusion that the mental degeneracy evidenced by the enormous number of backward children, educational failures, and the moral degeneracy evidenced by increasing juvenile delinquency and crime, are due to the same fundamental cause. From those data alone we might, with ample justification, adopt the words of a famous authority and say, “Defective nutrition lies at the base of all forms of degeneracy.”[71] We need not, however, rely upon this method, for there is no lack of direct testimony to show that low nutrition is the prime and most fruitful cause of mental dulness and its attendant evils.

I do not wish to be understood as contending that physical, mental, or moral defects never exist except as a result of defective nutrition, or that malnutrition never exists except as a result of poverty. I know, for instance, that a great many children are backward in their studies because they are handicapped by defects of vision or hearing, adenoid growths, and the like. These are often easily curable, and the fitting of proper glasses, or the removal of adenoid growths by slight surgical operations, suffice to bring such children up to the standard of normality. In an examination of over 7000 children in New York public schools one-third were found to have “defects of vision, interfering with the proper pursuit of their studies.”[72] In such cases malnutrition may or may not be the initial cause. That defective vision is often attributable to low and improper nutrition is beyond question. My contention is that the vast majority of dull and backward children, whose number makes a serious pedagogical problem, and a still more serious social problem in that so many of them become either inefficient and dependent, or criminal, are dull and backward as a result of physical inferiority directly traceable to poor and inadequate feeding.

A striking evidence of the association of underfeeding and mental dulness is afforded by the coincidence of numbers in the two classes wherever careful, expert investigations have been made. More than twenty years ago, as a result of some discussion upon the subject in the House of Commons, Dr. Crichton-Browne, the famous English authority upon mental diseases, prepared, at the request of the then vice-president of the Committee of Council on Education, Mr. Mundella, a report upon the physical and mental condition of the children in the elementary schools of London.[73] In that report Dr. Crichton-Browne pointed out that dulness, “sudden failure of intellect and languor of manner,” so prevalent among poorer children, were generally associated with hunger and semi-starvation. Later, the British Medical Association appointed a committee consisting of Drs. Hack Tuke, D. E. Shuttleworth, Fletcher Beach, and Francis Warner. They visited 14 schools scattered over a wide area and having a total enrolment of about 5000 children. For the purposes of examination 809 children were selected, of which number 231 were classed in the report as being mentally dull, and 184 as showing evident signs of defective nutrition. The report adds, “We do not suppose that we noted defective nutrition in all cases in which it may have been present.” Very often the conditions noted are coexistent, so a careful analysis of the figures was made, with the result that of the cases of mental dulness 28.50 per cent were found to be among those reported as suffering from defective nutrition, and the same proportion of mentally dull included in the cases of defective nutrition.[74] In the examination of the 7000 New York public school children already referred to, Dr. Cronin found 650 cases of “bad mentality” and 632 cases of “bad nutrition.” Similar investigations in several European cities, notably Turin, Christiania, and Paris, show very similar results.