A somewhat similar method of feeding the children has been tried for three years at Speyer School, the practice and experimental school of Teachers College, Columbia University.[82] The children of the lower grades are supplied with milk and crackers at ten o’clock in the morning, and “the teachers are unanimous in the statement that the children are all happier and more able to work” in consequence of being fed. These various experiments demonstrate beyond question that underfeeding is responsible for much of the mental degeneracy among school children and the resulting failure of so many of them to profit by the education which we provide for them. More than that, they point unerringly to the remedy. XI Summarizing, briefly, the results of this investigation, the problem of poverty as it affects school children may be stated in a few lines. All the data available tend to show that not less than 2,000,000 children of school age in the United States are the victims of poverty which denies them common necessities, particularly adequate nourishment. As a result of this privation they are far inferior in physical development to their more fortunate fellows. This inferiority of physique, in turn, is responsible for much mental and moral degeneration. Such children are in very many cases incapable of successful mental effort, and much of our national expenditure for education is in consequence an absolute waste. With their enfeebled bodies and minds we turn these children adrift unfitted for the struggle of life, which tends to become keener with every advance in our industrial development, and because of their lack of physical and mental training they are found to be inefficient industrially and dangerous socially. They become dependent, paupers, and the procreators of a pauper and dependent race.