e our comforts! Give but a moment again to the
significance of the figures I have italicized in the table that
follows, a summarized return for the year 1906 of the "Ringworm"
Nurses who visit the London Elementary Schools and inspect the
children for various forms of dirt disease.

----------------------------------------------------------------
| | Number of | | | |
| Departments. | children | Clean. | Partially | Verminous. |
| | examined. | | cleansed. | |
|--------------|-----------|-----------------------------------|
| Boys . | 34,345 | 32,726 | 847 | 1,139 |
| Girls . | 36,445 | 22,476 | 4,426 | 12,003 |
| Infants . | 42,140 | 6,675 | 2,661 | _29,675_ |
| Mixed . | 5,855 | 4,886 | 298 | 897 |
| Special . | 977 | 624 | 133 | 296 |
|--------------|-----------|----------|-----------|------------|
| Total . | 119,762 | 67,387 | 8,365 | 44,010 |
----------------------------------------------------------------

Does not this speak of dirt and disorder we cannot suffer to continue,
of women ill trained for motherhood and worked beyond care for
cleanliness, of a vast amount of preventable suffering? And these
figures of filth and bad clothing are paralleled by others at least
equally impressive, displaying emaciation, under-nutrition, anaemia and
every other painful and wretched consequence of neglect and
insufficiency. These underfed, under-clothed, undersized children are
also the backward children; they grow up through a darkened, joyless
childhood into a grey, perplexing, hopeless world that beats them down
at last, after servility, after toil, after crime it may be and
despair, to death.

And while you grasp the offence of these facts, do not be carried away
into supposing that this age is therefore unprecedentedly evil. Such
dirt, toil, cruelty have always been, have been in larger measure.
Don't idealize the primitive cave, the British hut, the peasant's
cottage, damp and windowless, the filth-strewn, plague-stricken,
mediaeval town. In spite of all these crushed, mangled, starved,
neglected little ones about the feet of this fine time, in spite of a
thousand other disorders and miseries almost as cruel, the fact
remains that this age has not only more but a larger percentage of
healt