CHAPTER XIV
THE NATION'S CHILDREN
LET us begin at the beginning with what should be the chief care of the reformer—the child.
Every year in the United Kingdom there are some 700,000 deaths and some 1,200,000 births. The social structure which we seek to improve thus offers us a double hope. However degraded, however enfeebled, however criminal many of the units of the present generation may be, they must pass away. Unit after unit is cancelled; unit after unit is replaced. The child, save in a small percentage of cases, is given to us an unsullied page, upon which we may write what we will.
If the reader would realize fully the truth which I have just expressed, let him ponder the following utterance by Professor D. J. Cunningham when under examination by the recent Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration. After referring to the manner in which changes in the condition of life affect the growth of an individual class, and more especially how poverty with its squalor, its bad feeding, and its attendant ignorance as to the proper nurture of the child, lowers the physical standard of the poor, he went on to say:
"In spite of the marked variations which are seen in the physique of the different classes of people of Great Britain, anthropologists believe, with good reason, that there is a mean physical standard which is the inheritance of the people as a whole, and that no matter how far certain sections of the people may deviate from this by deterioration (produced by the causes referred to) the tendency of the race as a whole will always be to maintain the inherited mean. In other words, those inferior bodily characters which are the result of poverty (and not vice such as syphilis and alcoholism) and which are therefore acquired during the lifetime of the individual, are not transmissible from one generation to another."
I break the quotation to accentuate the conclusion:
"Therefore, to restore the classes in which this inferiority exists to the mean standard of national physique, all that is required is to improve the standard of living, and in one or two generations the ground that has been lost will be recovered."
According to Dr Alfred Eichholz, H.M. Inspector of Schools, fully 90 per cent. of the children born in poor neighbourhoods are healthy. Dr Edward Malins, President of the Obstetrical Society, gives it as his opinion that 80 to 85 per cent. of children are born physically healthy, whatever the condition of the mother antecedently.[41] The weight of new-born children, he thinks, is, speaking generally, not below the average—there is a constant reversion to the race standard.
It is probable that these statements of Dr Eichholz and Dr Malins require some modification. Other evidence goes to show that it is far from true that the majority of children born in poor neighbourhoods are healthy. Thus Dr Henry Ashby, of Manchester, a leading authority on the diseases of children, said in a letter to the "Lancet" on October 1st, 1904:—