look out of place in New York and Kansas, so European laws and European
remedies are too frequently misfits when tried by American schools,
hospitals, or city governments. Yesterday a Canadian clergyman, after
preaching an eloquent sermon, met a professional beggar on the street
in New York City and emptied his purse--of Canadian money! Quite like
this is the enthusiastic demand of the tourist who has seen or read
about "the way it's done in Germany." The trouble is that European
remedies are valued like ruins, by their power to interest, by their
antiquity or picturesqueness, or, like the beggar, by their power to
stimulate temporary emotion. But we do not sleep in ruins, go to
church regularly in thirteenth-century abbeys, or live under the
remedies that fire our imagination. We do not therefore see their
everyday, practical-result side.

The souvenir value of European remedies is due to the assumption that
no better way was open to the European, and that the remedy actually
does what it is intended to do. Because free meals are given at school
to cure and prevent undernourishment, it is taken for granted that
undernourishment stops when free meals are introduced; therefore
America must have free meals. Because it is made compulsory in a
charming Italian village for every child to eat the free school meal,
it is taken for granted that the children of that village have no
physical defects; therefore let Kansas City, Seattle, and Boston
introduce compulsory free meals. But when one goes to Europe to see
exactly how those much-advertised, eulogized remedies operate from day
to day, it is often necessary to write, as did a great American
sanitarian recently, of health administration in foreign cities
continually held up as models to American cities: "In spite of the
rules and theories over here, the patient has better care in New York
City."

We have been asked of late to copy several very attractive European
remedies for the physiological ills of school children, and for the
physical deficiencies of the next generation of adults: breakfasts or
lunches, or both, at school for all children, rich as well as poor,
whether they want school nourishment or not; school meals for the poor
only; school meals to be given the poor, but to be bought by those who
can afford the small sum required; free eyeglasses for the poor, for
poor and well-to-do, for those who wish them, for those who need them
whether they want to wear eyeglas