Physically, no person familiar with the poorer quarters of any industrial district can doubt that such workers are suffering seriously. The whole report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration is little more than a report of the results of extreme poverty. Amid the accumulation of melancholy facts, however, is to be found evidence of a most hopeful kind. In our own country, at least, its seems to be true that the physical deterioration which comes of poverty (as distinguished from that which comes of vice) is rather personal than hereditary, and that the starved child will regain health and normality amid better conditions; so that even in a single generation any group of British people suffering from the effects of poverty may be restored to the average standard of the race if properly fed, properly clothed, properly housed, not overworked, and allowed plenty of air. The higher death rate, the inferior physique, the poorer vitality of the ill paid mark tendencies not inborn but acquired, all of which might and would disappear with the diminution of poverty and of that ignorance which is one outcome of poverty, and also, by reaction, one of the contributory causes of poverty. Degeneracy exists; but not a degenerate class; the class which we sometimes call degenerate is, as a class, merely starved. In short all that waste of human life, of human energy and of human happiness which is going on daily around us and is causing to the country a daily loss heavier than that of any campaign, is neither inevitable nor incurable. This misery might be sensibly diminished within three years, and might be ended within the lifetime of children already born. Nor is it the body alone that suffers the deterioration of poverty. The underfed brain too, remains stunted; and to be constantly hungry is to be constantly apathetic. Lassitude, inertia, the mental dulness that knows no pleasure except of the senses, no personal initiative and no activity save in response to external stimulus, these are the characteristics of the adult whose childhood has been passed in overcrowded rooms, whose food has been insufficient, his clothing inadequate, and to whom no wider horizons have ever been opened. Such an individual knows nothing of the real joys of life; he is a valueless citizen, consuming more than he produces, a poor worker, and even when not personally vicious, an influence rather towards degradation than towards progress.