STAMINA. 45 T 



is it essential next following the period of nursing, that every food 

 should be broken up, or 'refined' to facilitate its assimmilation and 

 combinations in the structures of the body, since the functions of the 

 organism are adapted to these processes. 



Unfortunately for the infant, however, it frequently happens that 

 after weaning, and if it has been nursed by a healthy mother, or other 

 wet nurse, being well fed on two or three pints of wholesome milk, 

 daily, its food supply is reduced by substitution of one kind or another, 

 more or less devoid of essential elements, with the common result of 

 emaciation and tenderness, and increased liability to sickness. More- 

 over, as said by Dr. William H. Maxwell, Superintendent of Public 

 Schools of New York City and president of the National Educational 

 Association, in his address at the International Congress of Arts and 

 Science, September 23, 190-1: 



Education, whether physical or mental, is seriously retarded, if not prac- 

 tically impossible, when the body is improperly or imperfectly nourished. The 

 child of poverty, with body emaciated, blood thin and nerves on edge, because 

 he has not enough to eat, grows up stunted in body and in mind. 



What a farce it is to talk of schools providing equal opportunities for all 

 when there are hundreds of thousands of children in our city schools who can 

 not learn because they are always hungry! 



The schools of Paris provide a simple, wholesome midday meal for their 

 hungry children. In many places in the British Islands the same thing is being 

 done. Should we do less in the cities of democratic America? In no other 

 way can we be sure that the schools will, as far as education may, provide equal 

 opportunities for all. 



With regard to certain infectious diseases to which children are 

 especially liable, in part, doubtless, because of their greater functional 

 activity, but chiefly because their power of resistance has not yet be- 

 come sufficiently fortified — for it is well known that adults generally 

 who have not encountered those diseases in childhood rarely contract 

 them subsequently — the same relative immunity exists; the strong and 

 vigorous child is much less likely to contract them than the feeble; 

 and the convalescent, those who are particularly feeble from any one 

 of such diseases, are well known to be the most of all liable to attack 

 and to succumb from another. And of pulmonary consumption, the 

 most prevalent and the most fatal of all diseases, who does not know 

 that enfeeblement invites it? That individuals are less and less liable 

 to it — whether traceable to hereditary taint or otherwise — in propor- 

 tion as coddling has been avoided, appetite for wholesome fat food 

 cultivated, cold bathing habitual, protective but loose clothing worn, 

 and exercise in the open air unrestrained? By the maintenance of 

 these conditions all the processes of healthy organization are promoted 

 and the constitution fortified against tubercle bacilli, as, in like man- 

 ner, against other disease germs, no matter whence the quarter or at 



