So that the problem is not merely one of economic waste represented by a fruitless and vain expenditure for the education of children who are not capable of benefiting by it. It is not merely a question of economic waste added to educational failure and the peril to society which that failure must involve in the crime which ignorance breeds and fosters. All these things are involved, and, in addition to them, is involved the terrible fact that we turn them adrift in the world, unfit for its service and unable to adjust themselves to its needs. In the very nature of things, because they are ill developed of body and mind, they must become industrially inefficient. They sink from depth to depth in the industrial abyss, “To endure wrongs darker than death or night.” Where giant machines, inventors’ brains, and ambitious immigrants in countless numbers all conspire to narrow the labor market, they are ruthlessly thrust aside. They are not only unemployed but unemployable. They become paupers, driven into the morass of pauperism by forces that are practically, for them, irresistible. Thus is the problem of pauperism perpetuating itself. And to the economic waste represented by the expenditure upon them in the schools must be added the further cost of their support as dependants and paupers. It is a vicious circle. X That these same conditions are a fruitful source of criminality is unquestionable. All our studies of juvenile delinquency point to the fact that a very large proportion of the children who become truants, moral perverts, and criminals are drawn from this same class of physically degenerate children. It is commonplace nowadays to say that many of our criminals are not really criminals at all, but the victims of physical or mental abnormalities, often directly traceable to low nutrition. In observing a number of juvenile delinquents the proportion of ill-developed children is generally noticeable. Professor G. Stanley Hall says, “Juvenile criminals, as a class, are inferior in body and mind to normal children, and ... their social environment is no less inferior.”[68] Professor Dawson found among boys and girls in reformatory institutions a tendency to lighter weight, shorter stature, and less strength of grip; 16 per cent of them being “clearly sufferers from low nutrition.”[69] Professor Kline has shown the same general condition in a striking study, and concludes that “low nutrition breeds discontent and a tendency to run away.”[70] A mass of very similar testimony might be cited from the records of the most competent investigators in this and other countries. It is the universal experience that a low standard of physical development is almost invariably associated with low mental and moral standards.