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of procuring the greatest food values for a given expenditure of money
and of the proper preparation and cooking of food, is a forcible
argument in favour of the teaching of cooking along with other
branches of domestic economy as part of the scheme of our compulsory
education. The shortage of food and the ignorant selection of food
among the poor is nor only responsible for much ill-health and indirect
mortality, but it presents in itself a serious handicap to education. An
underfed child is not in a proper condition to benefit from the teaching
given him, and unless he is adequately fed he will frequently go to
join the ranks of the physically unfit.
The expenditure on drink in the United Kingdom is about
£180,000,000 a year, and it is calculated that the working classes
spend about one-seventh of their income upon alcohol. Social problems
are complex, and causes and results act and re-act. Poverty, alcoholism
and degradation tend to create and perpetuate the conditions which
cause them. There can be no doubt that poverty, and the unhealthy
conditions of housing which it entails, tends to promote drinking, but
there can be no reasonable doubt that a very large proportion of this
poverty is due to drink. In the opinion of those who have specially
studied this question, drinking is far more often the cause of poverty
than poverty is the cause of drinking. Much of the inability to secure
satisfactory food and comfortable homes results from the circumstance
that the money necessary to provide them is spent on drink, and as a
consequence, apart from the drink itself, the associated conditions beget
disease and deteriorate physical vigour. Any effective legislation
which reduces alcoholism will reduce, in even a greater proportion,
every social public health problem of the day.
Senile Mortality.—Of the 685 deaths 192 were of persons over
65 years of age. The proportion of deaths occurring among those of
over 65 years of age to the total deaths is, therefore, about 28 per cent.
There were 130 deaths of persons over 70 years of age, and 44 of
persons over 80, 5 of whom reached 90 years of age—the oldest being
92. These figures denote an exceptionally high proportion of senile
mortality.