organization of existing agencies for the welfare of lads and
girls, education, school attendance in rural districts, defective
children.

III. AS TO LIVING AND WORKING CONDITIONS

Register of sickness, medical certificates as to causes of death,
overcrowding, building and open spaces, register of owners of
buildings, unsanitary and overcrowded house property, rural
housing, workshops, coal mines, etc., medical inspection of
factories, employment of women in factories, labor colonies,
overfatigue, food and cooking, cooking grates, adulteration, smoke
pollution, alcohol, syphilis, insanity.

IV. AS TO HEALTH MACHINERY

Medical officers of health, local, district, and national boards,
health associations.

Scientists of the next generation will continue to differ as to
heredity truths and heredity bugaboos unless records are kept now,
showing the physical condition of school children and of applicants for
work certificates and for civil service and army positions. The British
investigators declared that "anthropometric records are the only
accredited tests available, and, if collected on a sufficient scale,
they would constitute the supreme criterion of physical deterioration,
or the reverse.... The school population and the classes coming under
the administration of the Factory Acts offer ready material for the
immediate application of such tests." In addition to the physical tests
proposed in other chapters, there is great educational opportunity in
the records of private and public hospitals. Every nation, every state,
and every city should enlist all its educational and scientific forces
to ascertain in what respects social efficiency is endangered by
physical deficiencies that can be avoided only by restricting
parenthood, and the environmental deficiencies that can be avoided by
efficient health machinery.

The greatest of all heredity truths are these: (1) the deficiencies of
infants are infinitesimal compared with the deficiencies of the world
with which we surround them; (2) each of us can have a part in
begetting for posterity an environment of health and of opportunity.

CHAPTER XXXIV

INEFFECTIVE AND EFFECTIVE WAYS OF COMBATING ALCOHOLISM

Wherever the Stars and Stripes fly over school buildings it is made
compulsory to teach the evils of alcoholism. For nearly a generation
the great majority of school children of the United States have been
taught that alco