Eleven per cent. verminous; think what it means! Think what the homes must be like from which these poor little wretches come! Better, perhaps, than the country cottage where the cesspool drains into the water supply and the hen-house vermin invades the home, but surely intolerable beside our comforts! Give but a moment again to the significance of the figures I have italicized in the table that follows, a summarized return for the year 1906 of the "Ringworm" Nurses who visit the London Elementary Schools and inspect the children for various forms of dirt disease. ---------------------------------------------------------------- | | Number of | | | | | Departments. | children | Clean. | Partially | Verminous. | | | examined. | | cleansed. | | |--------------|-----------|-----------------------------------| | Boys . | 34,345 | 32,726 | 847 | 1,139 | | Girls . | 36,445 | 22,476 | 4,426 | 12,003 | | Infants . | 42,140 | 6,675 | 2,661 | _29,675_ | | Mixed . | 5,855 | 4,886 | 298 | 897 | | Special . | 977 | 624 | 133 | 296 | |--------------|-----------|----------|-----------|------------| | Total . | 119,762 | 67,387 | 8,365 | 44,010 | ---------------------------------------------------------------- Does not this speak of dirt and disorder we cannot suffer to continue, of women ill trained for motherhood and worked beyond care for cleanliness, of a vast amount of preventable suffering? And these figures of filth and bad clothing are paralleled by others at least equally impressive, displaying emaciation, under-nutrition, anæmia and every other painful and wretched consequence of neglect and insufficiency. These underfed, under-clothed, undersized children are also the backward children; they grow up through a darkened, joyless childhood into a grey, perplexing, hopeless world that beats them down at last, after servility, after toil, after crime it may be and despair, to death. And while you grasp the offence of these facts, do not be carried away into supposing that this age is therefore unprecedentedly evil. Such dirt, toil, cruelty have always been, have been in larger measure. Don't idealize the primitive cave, the British hut, the peasant's cottage, damp and windowless, the filth-strewn, plague-stricken, mediæval town. In spite of all these crushed, mangled, starved, neglected little ones about the feet of this fine time, in spite of a thousand other disorders and miseries almost as cruel, the fact remains that this age has not only more but a larger percentage of healthy, happy, kindly-treated children than any age since the world began; that to look back into the domestic history of other times is to see greater squalor and more suffering.