“The little fellow’s eyes flashed and he looked straight at me and said, ‘No, mum, I don’t want it.’ Really, I admired his spirit. Poor as he was, he did not want charity.” Better than any argument the principal’s own words show the cruel, inquisitorial method and its effectiveness in suppressing the truth. I repeat, that was the method of inquiry generally adopted, and it was upon reports based upon the results of such examinations that the special committee of the Board of Education based its report. V Of course, not all teachers are so tactless. A very large number are merely unobservant, possibly because they have become inured to the pitiful appearance of the children and their painfully low physical development. It is common to hear teachers in poor districts say: “When I first came to this school my heart used to ache with pity on account of the poverty-stricken appearance of many of the children and the sad tales they sometimes tell. But now I have grown used to it all.” That, in many cases, tells the whole secret—they have grown accustomed to the sight of stunted bodies and wan, pinched faces. There are teachers, earnest men and women devoted to their profession, and consecrating it by an almost religious passion, who study the home life and social environment of the children intrusted to their care; but they are, unhappily, exceptions. The number of teachers having no idea of how a healthy child should look is astonishingly large. The hectic flush of disease is often mistaken by teachers and principals for the bloom of health.