President Roosevelt in his Annual Message of 1907 bluntly stated the facts as follows:
“Industry in the United States now exacts ... a far heavier toll of death than all of our wars put together.... The number of deaths in battle in all the foreign wars put together for the last century and a quarter, aggregate considerably less than one year’s death record for our industries.”
It is inevitable that this slaughter of the toilers both in industry and in war will work rapidly and disastrously against the general blood-vigor of society. Serious and conservative students of the blood-letting and blood-weakening tendencies of capitalistic society are beginning to sound the alarm. The startlingly visible results in British society serve as excellent illustrative material. For more than two hundred years vast numbers of the soundest, strongest British workingmen have been slaughtered or weakened in war; and for more than a hundred years (the era of intense machine production) the British workingmen, women, and children have been cruelly overworked, underfed and ill-clad in the struggle for existence—in the industrial civil war called capitalism. And here are some of the results:
“In Manchester,” says Thomas Burke,[[107]] “out of 12,000 would-be recruits [for the South African War], 8,000 were rejected as virtually invalids, and only 1,200 could be regarded as fit in all respects.... General Sir Frederick Maurice declared that, according to the best evidence he could obtain, it was the fact that for many years out of every five recruits only two were found to be physically fit after two years’ service.... It was, indeed, a startling fact that 60 per cent. of the men offering themselves for active service were physically unfit.”
Thus the well-known preacher and lecturer, Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, of Brooklyn, New York:[[108]]
“Many forms of public charity, from a scientific viewpoint, seem a curse, while wars and many industries seem the enemies of the blood of the nation.... The national physique has suffered an incalculable loss. In one factory town [in England] the military commission, examining young men for the South African War, rejected nineteen out of twenty, because of some defect in the eyes or lungs or legs.”
It is to be remembered that many thousands of men who report for examination as candidates for military service are so evidently defective that no formal examination is necessary for their prompt rejection. It is also important to consider the fact that there are many thousands of men who would gladly join the army, but make no application, knowing well, in advance, that they would be rejected as unfit. Thus the statistics showing that a large per cent. of those reporting to the military department as candidates for the service are “rejected on examination,” even these statistics do not fully reveal the unfortunate condition of affairs. In ten of the largest cities of England and Scotland in the year ending September 30, 1907, there were 34,808 applicants for admission to the army. Forty-seven per cent. of these applicants were rejected as physically unfit.[[109]] Of course, the percentage of rejections would have been far heavier if all had applied who would have been glad to join the army.
The next generation of English working-class people will probably be far more physically defective than the present generation.
In Westham public school (London) it was recently found:
“... That 87 per cent. of the infants and 70 per cent. of the older children were below the normal physique. These were all children of the dockers.