120 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



A similar example of this overcrowding is shown in another moun- 

 tain home. This small shack one could hardly call it a house 

 contains seven people. The building is composed of four rooms 

 kitchen, sitting-room, and two bedrooms, one of which is used by four 

 people and the other by three. The rooms are so diminutive and the 

 windows so small that, although these people live right on the foot- 

 hills of a wild mountain country, they are living under very badly 

 overcrowded conditions and are paying the penalty tuberculosis. 



The worst case of overcrowding, however, that I have ever seen 

 appeared one day last summer when I prepared to administer immu- 

 nizing doses of antitoxin to an Italian family during an epidemic of 

 diphtheria. Thirteen children lined up to take their "medicine"; in 

 addition, there were six adults, making nineteen human beings living 

 in one house, and this house containing only six rooms. Where these 

 people slept was almost a mystery, for there were but three beds in 

 the house. They simply stretched out on the floor; and their pale 

 and sallow faces told the cost the great cost of overcrowding. 

 You might think this was a Hester Street tenement, but it happened 

 to be a farmhouse, situated in one of the most beautiful valleys of 

 southern Pennsylvania, far from the smoke and din of cities. The 

 old idea that the country is such a healthful place to live in is good 

 only so far as the country is fresh from the hand of the Lord, for man's 

 make-over in the country is generally poor very poor. 



While the home life is vastly more important than the school life, 

 and though the sanitary arrangements of the surrounding farmhouses 

 are usually vastly worse than the neighboring schools, yet it is quite 

 likely that the country school overcrowded and with glaring sanitary 

 faults is an item in the rural health. The little one-room school- 

 house, so common all over the country, has turned out some great 

 and good men, and women too, but it has also turned out many that 

 might have gotten along better in the world if their physical condition 

 and welfare had been looked after: it is a good thing to remember that 

 real progress is not the progress of the few great men, but the standard 

 and average of the plain, ordinary citizen. 



The air-space per pupil should be between 250 and 500 cubic feet, 

 depending on the means of ventilation: if there is no special arrange- 

 ment for the admission of fresh air, the greater air-space 500 cubic 

 feet will surely not be too much. In an ordinary country school 

 overcrowded, of course I have seen the air-space as small as 100 

 cubic feet per pupil, which is, without question, entirely too low. 



