of the greatest benefit to the respectable but very poor,
who are too proud to apply for charity meals, and whose children are
often penalised by want, and the various avoidable defects or ailments
that come in its train.'

"Feeding wanted.--Of the children of a Bethnal Green school, the school
doctor is quoted as reporting that 'it was not hospital treatment but
feeding that was wanted.'

"Among curious oddments of information contained in the report, it is
mentioned that the children of widows generally show superior physique.

"The teeth are often better in children from the poorer homes, 'perhaps
from use on rougher food materials which leaves less DEBRIS to undergo
fermentation.'

"'Children of poorer homes also often have the advantage of the fresh
air of the streets, whilst the better-off child is kept indoors and
becomes flabby and less resistant to minor ailments. The statistics of
infantile mortality suggest that the children of the poorer schools
have also gone through a more severe selection; disease weeding out by
natural selection, and the less fit having succumbed before school age,
the residue are of sturdier type than in schools or classes where such
selection has been less intense.'"

CHAPTER III. THE NOMADS

A considerable portion of the inhabitants of the world below the line
are wanderers, without home, property, work or any visible means of
existence. For twenty years it has been the fashion to speak of them
as the "submerged," and a notable philanthropist taught the public to
believe that they formed one-tenth of our population.

It was currently reported in the Press that the philanthropist I have
referred to offered to take over and salve this mass of human wreckage
for the sum of one million pounds. His offer was liberally responded to;
whether he received the million or not does not matter, for he has at
any rate been able to call to his assistance thousands of men and women,
and to set them to work in his own peculiar way to save the "submerged."

From a not unfriendly book just published, written by one who was for
more than twenty years intimately associated with him, and one of
the chief directors of his salvage work, we learn that the result has
largely been a failure.

To some of us this failure had been apparent for many years, and though
we hoped much from the movement, we could not close our eyes to facts,
and reluctantly had to admit that the number of the "submerged" d