The yearly loss of these priceless baby lives does not, however, represent the full measure of the awful cost of the poverty which surrounds the cradle. It is not only that 75,000 or 80,000 die, but that as many more of those who survive are irreparably weakened and injured. Not graves alone but hospitals and prisons are filled with the victims of childhood poverty. They who survive go to school, but are weak, nervous, dull, and backward in their studies. Discouraged, they become morose and defiant, and soon find their way into the “reformatories,” for truancy or other juvenile delinquencies. Later they fill the prisons, for the ranks of the vagrant and the criminal are recruited from the truant and juvenile offender. Or if happily they do not become vicious, they fail in the struggle for existence, the relentless competition of the crowded labor mart, and sink into the abysmal depths of pauperism. Weakened and impaired by the privations of their early years, they cannot resist the attacks of disease, and constant sickness brings them to the lowest level of that condition which the French call _la misère_. V However interesting and sociologically valuable such an analysis might be, the separation of the different features of poverty so as to determine their relative influence upon the sum of mortality and sickness is manifestly impossible. We cannot say that bad housing accounts for so many deaths, poor clothing for so many, and hunger for so many more. These and other evils are regularly associated in cases of poverty, the underfed being almost invariably poorly clad, and housed in the least healthy homes. We cannot regard them as distinct problems; they are only different phases of the same problem of poverty,—a problem which does not lend itself to dissection at the hands of the investigator. Still, notwithstanding that for many years all efforts to reduce the rate of mortality among infants have dealt only with questions of bad housing and of unhygienic conditions in general,—on the assumption that these are the most important factors making for a high rate of infant mortality,—it is now generally admitted that, important as they are in themselves, these are relatively unimportant factors in the infant death-rate. “Sanitary conditions do not make any real difference at all,” and “It is food and food alone,” was the testimony of Dr. Vincent before the British Interdepartmental Committee,[20] and he was supported by some of the most eminent of his colleagues in that position. That the evils of underfeeding are intensified when there is an unhygienic environment is true, but it is equally true that defect in the diet is the prime and essential cause of an excessive prevalence of infantile diseases and of a high death-rate.