It is not, however, the occasional hunger, the loss of a few meals now and then in such periods of distress, that is of most importance; it is the chronic underfeeding day after day, month after month, year after year. Even where lack of all food is rarely or never experienced, there is often chronic underfeeding. There may be food sufficient as to quantity, but qualitatively poor and almost wholly lacking in nutritive value, and such is the tragic fate of those dependent upon it that they do not even know that they are underfed in the most literal sense of the word. They live and struggle and go down to their graves without realizing the fact of their disinheritance. A plant uprooted and left lying upon the ground withers quickly and dies; planted in dry, lifeless, arid soil it would wither and die, too, less quickly perhaps but as surely. It dies when there is no soil about its roots and it dies when there is soil in abundance, but no nourishing qualities in the soil. As the plant is, so is the life of a child; where there is no food, starvation is swift, mercifully swift, and complete; when there is only poor food lacking in nutritive qualities starvation is partial, slower, and less merciful. The thousands of rickety infants to be seen in all our large cities and towns, the anæmic, languid-looking children one sees everywhere in working-class districts, and the striking contrast presented by the appearance of the children of the well-to-do bear eloquent witness to the widespread prevalence of underfeeding. Poverty and Death are grim companions. Wherever there is much poverty the death-rate is high and rises higher with every rise of the tide of want and misery. In London, Bethnal Green’s death-rate is nearly double that of Belgravia;[2] in Paris, the poverty-stricken district of Ménilmontant has a death-rate twice as high as that of the Elysée;[3] in Chicago, the death-rate varies from about twelve per thousand in the wards where the well-to-do reside to thirty-seven per thousand in the tenement wards.[4] The ill-developed bodies of the poor, underfed and overburdened with toil, have not the powers of resistance to disease possessed by the bodies of the more fortunate. As fire rages most fiercely and with greatest devastation among the ill-built, crowded tenements, so do the fierce flames of disease consume most readily the ill-built, fragile bodies which the tenements shelter. As we ascend the social scale the span of life lengthens and the death-rate gradually diminishes, the death-rate of the poorest class of workers being three and a half times as great as that of the well-to-do. It is estimated that among 10,000,000 persons of the latter class the annual deaths do not number more than 100,000, among the best paid of the working-class the number is not less than 150,000, while among the poorest workers the number is at least 350,000.[5] The following diagram illustrates these figures clearly and needs no further comment:—