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Parliament on the subject. In April, 1903, the Director General of
the Army Medical Service, in a memorandum on the physical fitness
of men offering themselves for enlistment in the army, pointed out
that in spite of the large proportion of men found physically unfit for
service, the public health Statistics appear to show progressive improvement
in the national health, and that feats of strength, agility, and endurance
point, at any rate, to an improvement in the physique in the
well-to-do classes. He went on to state that at the last census 25
millions of the 32½ millions live in towns, the town population having
increased 15 per cent, in the last decade, that the bulk of our soldiers are
drawn from the class of unskilled labourers from the towns, and that the
highest number of rejections are among men employed in indoor occupations.
That the deterioration of the physique of the urban poor is
attributed to insufficient and poor quality of food, defective housing,
overcrowding, and insanitary surroundings. Of the 77 per cent, of the
population estimated to live in towns, about 25 per cent, would appear on
trustworthy investigations, to be not only poor, but living in such poverty
as to be unable to rear their children under conditions favourable to
health and physical fitness. In the autumn of 1903, Parliament appointed
an inter-departmental committee on physical deterioration which held its
first meeting in December of that year. The evidence taken before the
Commission is contained in a bulky volume of some 500 pages. The
evidence given by Dr. Eichholz is so excellent throughout, when he speaks
of the condition of school children, that it is almost impossible to refrain
from quoting it in detail. He thinks that the condition of some of the
children in our poor schools portrays a serious condition of affairs brought
about by the absence of proper food and clothing, the presence of overcrowding,
drunkenness in the parent, uncleanliness, and general lack of
practical knowledge in home management. In his general evidence he
says:— "there is in the nation an upper class well-to-do and well cared
for, to whom our methods afford every chance of mental and physical improvement.
They come out well, and furnish a population probably not
excelled by any in this country or any other. At the other end of the
scale we find the aggregation of slum population, ill-nourished, poor, and
badly housed. They are the degenerates for whom this enquiry is
presumably instituted. Between these two is the third and largest
stratum consisting, of an average industrial artisan population, in which
the bread winners are in regular employment. It is the aggregation of
the slum population which is largely responsible for the prominent public
notice called to their physical condition." Dr. Colley says:—"Physical
infirmity is practically confined to the poor and lowest strata of the
population, whose children are improperly and insufficiently fed and