ion of children to visit a board of
health, some substitute must be found. This substitute has been already
suggested by principals and district superintendents in New York City,
who claim that the natural place for the examination of children is the
school and not health headquarters. Developing the idea that the school
should pronounce the child's fitness to leave school and to engage in
work, we are led to the suggestion that the state, which compels
evidence that every child, rich or poor, is being taught during the
compulsory school age, shall also at the age of fourteen or sixteen
require evidence that the child is physically fit to use his education,
and that it shall not, because of preventable ill health, prove a
losing investment.

Parochial and private schools, the ultra-religious and ultra-rich, may
resent for a time public supervision of the physical condition of
children who do not ask for work certificates. This position will be
short-lived, because however much we may disagree about society's right
to control a child's act after his physical defects are discovered, few
of us will question the state's duty to tell that child and his
parents the truth about his physical needs before it accepts his labor
or permits him to go to college, to "come out," to "enter society," or
to live on an income provided by others. Thus an invaluable
commencement present can be given by the state to children in country
schools and to those compelled to drop out of fourth or fifth grades of
city schools.

[Illustration: THE HEALTH DEPARTMENT'S CLINICAL CARE AND HOME
INSTRUCTION COME AFTER WAGE LOSSES, WHILE WORK CERTIFICATES
PRECEDE BREAKDOWNS FROM TUBERCULOSIS]

A brief test of this method of helping children, such as is now being
made by several boards of health at the instance of the National Bureau
of Labor, will prove conclusively that parents are grateful for the
timely discovery of these defects which handicap because of their
existence, not because of their discovery. Of the cadets preparing for
war at West Point, it has recently been decided that those "who in the
physical examinations are found to have deteriorated below the
prescribed physical standard will be dropped from the rolls of the
academy." Shall not cadets preparing for an industrial life and
citizenship be given at least a knowledge of an adequate physical
standard? To allow the school child to deteriorate whether before or
after going to