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ALS IK KAN: NOTES: REVIEWS
quate and improper food supply. He
shows the relation of the lack of food to
poverty. The child of poverty is brought
before us. His weaknesses, his mental
and physical inferiority, his failure, his
sickness, his death, are shown in their
relation to improper and inadequate food.
He first proves to our satisfaction that
this child of misery is born into the world
with powerful potentialities, and he then
shows, with tragic power, how the lack
of proper food during infancy makes
it inevitable that this child become, if he
lives at all, an incompetent, physical
weakling. It is perhaps unnecessary to
point out that the problem of poverty
is largely summed up in the fate of this
child, and when the author deals with
this subject he is in reality treating of
poverty in the germ."
   Mr. Spargo holds that, among the many
 causes of poverty in this country of abun-
 dance, this question of insufficient nu-
 trition during childhood, and the conse-
 quent stunting of all capabilities in the
 adult, is the great fundamental fact which
 lies at the base of the problem, and that,
 although it is a fact that should be fully
 known to the men and women who work
 in the field of our philanthropies, it has
 heretofore been almost entirely ignored
 by this class of workers. Therefore, as
 he says himself, he has tried to visualize
 some of the principal phases of the social
 problem-the measure in which the lack
 of nutrition due to poverty and ignorance
 is responsible for the excessive infan-
 tile disease and mortality, the tragedy
 and folly of attempting to educate the
 hungry, ill-fed school child, and the ter-
 rible burdens borne by the working child
 in our modern industrial system. He
abandons absolutely the theory held by
so many, and at one time held by himself,
that the great mass of the children of
the poor were blighted before they were
born, citing the results of strict and
exhaustive scientific scrutiny to prove
that the theory of antenatal degeneracy
is untenable, and that the most convinc-
ing evidence goes to show that Nature
starts all her children, rich and poor,
physically equal, so that each generation
gets practically a fresh start, unhampered
by the diseased and degenerate past.
  In England the high infantile mor-
tality has occasioned much alarm and
agitation, but Mr. Spargo points out that
statistics show that the infantile death
rate in the United States is not nearly
so far below that of England as is gen-
erally supposed, and that it can safely
be said that in this, the richest and great-
est country in the world's history, pov-
erty is responsible for the loss of at least
eighty thousand infant lives every year,
and that as many more of those who sur-
vive are irreparably weakened and in-
jured, so that not graves alone, but hos-
pitals and prisons, are filled with the
victims of childhood poverty. One of
the prime causes of this appalling loss is
due to underfeeding or improper feeding,
but another cause is the inevitable neglect
that arises from the necessity for mothers
to work in order to keep the family in-
come up to the level of sufficiency for
the maintenance of its members, and the
intrusting of young children to ignorant
and irresponsible caretakers. Even those
whose grip on life is dogged enough to
carry them past these worst dangers are
handicapped in the matter of ability to
receive the free education that is one of
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