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.