We have seen that one cause of insanity and disease, and of immorality
and crime, is degeneration. And we have seen that one cause of
degeneration is "insufficient or improper food."
Children who are half starved suffer in body and in mind: therefore they
suffer in intelligence and in morals.
Says Dr. Hall, of Leeds:
It matters but little whether a child be born and bred in a palace or
a cottage--of pure pedigree or mongrel--if he does not receive a proper
supply of bone-making food he will not make a good bony framework, which
is the first essential of true physical well-being.
Amongst the poor it is a common thing for children to want food: not to
have enough food. This is not the fault of the children, but is due to
the poverty of their parents.
But it is common also amongst the poor for children to be fed upon
improper food. Quite young infants, babies, indeed, are often fed upon
salt fish, rancid bacon, impure milk. Cases are too numerous in which
babies are given beer, gin, coarse and badly cooked meat, inferior
bread, and tea.
This is not the fault of the children, but is due to the ignorance of
their parents.
The results of such feeding, and of such starvation, are weakness,
poorness of blood, deafness, sore eyes, defective intelligence, rickets,
epilepsy, convulsions, consumption; degeneration and death.
Professor Cunningham says:
One point which is established beyond all question is the remarkable
influence which environment and nurture exercise upon the development
and growth of the child, as well as upon the standard of physical
excellence attained by the adult According to the statistics supplied to
the British Association Committee, children vary to the extent of 5 in.
in stature, and adults to the extent of 3 1/2 in. in stature, according
as the circumstances under which they are reared are favourable or
otherwise.
Dr. R. J. Collie, M.D., speaking of the mentally defective children in
the London Board Schools, says:
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.