Independent evidence pointing to the conclusion that food is at the bottom of the physiological causes of unrest, apart from an examination of that food itself, may be gathered from the appalling statistics of health recently published by the Ministry of National Service. The temptation in reading this report is to conclude that [p189] unhealthy urban and industrial conditions are the cause of the general debility, of which only the acute cases are noticed in the report. But the compilers of the document itself carefully warn the reader against this facile explanation of the trouble, and call attention to the fact that ill-health is also very great in rural districts. Now, short of a plague, an epidemic, or a condition of universal degeneration, the only factor that can possibly account for ill-health and debility being general both in urban and rural centres, is either food or climate, either of which is common to both kinds of population. Dismissing climate as having been a more or less constant factor, we are therefore left with food. (_a_) Now it is the present writer’s conviction that much of the present debility of the masses, or at least enough of it to account for some discontent and disaffection, is to be ascribed to the inferiority of the foodstuffs they consume from their earliest infancy to the very end of their days. In all cases where mothers cannot nurse their children, the trouble begins at the very dawn of life, and starts by disordering a system which is doomed to continuous disturbances until it can find ultimate release only in death. The Baby Welfare Centres recently established are all doing their utmost, it is true, to combat this evil, but they have to fight not merely against the ignorance of parents and of local doctors, but above all against the criminal unscrupulousness of commercial food proprietors. Everywhere advertisements are to be read concerning foods of which it is claimed [p190] that they are an adequate substitute for mother’s milk, and there is no law, no regulation, and no official system of instruction, to prevent ignorant mothers from being taken in by these means of publicity. The organisations, small and inadequate as they are, which are attempting to fight this evil, are entirely the result of private enterprise. The Government of the country does nothing to secure infants against the double and pernicious operation of these two first enemies of life, Ignorance and its Commercial Exploitation. As growing children and adults, these infants continue under the debilitating influences of their earliest days by being fed on every kind of adulterated food, from impure bread to faked jam; and even when they have had the good fortune to have been reared at the breast, their regimen of inferior food in later life quickly undermines the solid basis of their constitutions.