It is undoubtedly true that just as the sick child may be found at the
head of his class, so unhealthy men and women are often good business
managers, good salesmen, good typewriters, successful capitalists. They
excel, however, not because of their ill health, but in spite of it,
excepting of course those instances where men and women, because of ill
health, have devoted to business an attention that would have been
given to recreation if bad health had not deprived recreation of its
pleasure. As statistics in school have proved that the majority of
mentally superior children are also physically superior, so statistics
will probably prove that the number of the "sick superior" among the
working classes is very small, while the danger of inefficiency that
comes from physical defect is very great.

There is one time in the individual's working life when the state may
properly step in and demand an inventory of physical resources, and
that is when the child asks the state for permission to go to work.
Strategically, this is probably the most important of all contact as
yet provided between society and the future wage earner. Here at the
threshold of his industrial career the boy may be told for what work he
is physically fitted, what physical defects need to be remedied, what
physical precautions he needs to take, in order to do justice to
himself and his opportunity.

Every year from two to three million children leave the public schools
of this country to join the army of workers. The percentage of those
recruits who have physical defects needing attention is undoubtedly
great; how great we shall never know until the benefits of physical
examination are given to all of them. What steps is your state taking
to ascertain the physical fitness of the children who present
themselves each year for working papers? How does it insure itself
against the risk of their defective eyesight, chorea, deafness, or
general debility? Does it inform children of their defects, or tell
them how they may increase their earning power by correcting these
defects? What effort does it make to induce children to avoid dangerous
trades, or trades that are particularly dangerous for their physiques?

At the close of school last spring I had my secretary look in upon the
New York board of health and see what demands that city makes upon its
boys and girls before allowing them to drive its machinery, to run its
elevators, to match its colors, to se