In a large number of instances, after the careful individual attention and mid-day dinner of the special schools, they are returned, after from six to eighteen months, to the elementary school with a new lease of mental vigour. These children are functionally mentally defective. Their brains are starved, and naturally fail to react to the ordinary methods of elementary teaching. In a certain proportion of the cases it is the result of semi-starvation.
The headmaster of a large school in London said to a Press representative:
Not 5 per cent, of my 400 boys know the taste of porridge. New bread, and margarine at fourpence per pound, with a scrap of fried fish and potatoes at irregular intervals, is responsible for their pinched, unhealthy appearance and their stunted growth.
Dr. Lydston, in The Diseases of Society, says:
The quantity, quality, and assimilation of food pabulum is the keynote of stability of tissue-building. With the source of the architect's own energy sapped by innutrition, and the materials brought to his hand made pernicious or defective in quality or insufficient in quantity, structural degeneracy must needs result. The importance of this as regards the brain is obvious. It bears directly upon the question of the relation of malnutrition to social pathology.
So much has been written and said of late about the evil effects of starvation and improper food upon the health and minds of children, and so much and such strong evidence has been put forward as to the seriousness and the prevalence of the evil, that I need not go more fully into the matter here.
Millions of children are ruined in body and mind, millions of degenerates are made by bad feeding or under-feeding.
And the good and the bad feeding are both part of our environment.
Poverty, Labor, and Overcrowding
As the health affects the brain, and the brain the morals, all healthy and unhealthy influences have a moral bearing.