-66 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



prt'liostei-oiis father of Socialism and Co-opei'atioii, " as Lytton Strachey 

 calls him, gives a good idea of the conditions I'uling in the early years 

 of last century in one oi our staple industries. ' In the manufacturing 

 districts it is common for parents to send their children of both sexes 

 at seven or eight years of age, in winter as well as summer, at six 

 o'clock in the morning, sometimes, of course, in the dark, and occa- 

 sionally amidst frost and snow, to ent-er the manufactories which are 

 often heated to a high temjoerature, and contain an atmosphere far 

 from being the most favourable to human life, and in which all those 

 employed in them very frequently continue until twelve o'clock at noon, 

 when an hour is allowed for dinner, after which they return to remain, 

 in a majority of cases, till eight o'clock at night.' Six till eight, with 

 a break of one hour : a fourteen hours day, and fifteen was not mi- 

 known. Owen, in the article from which I have quoted, was petition- 

 ing Parliament, asking wliat? That a twelve hours day be instituted, 

 to include one and a-half hours for meals, and that no child should be 

 employed until the age of ten was reached. He pointed out in the 

 course of the article that the results from the manufacturers' point of 

 view would be better with a twelve hours day (i.e that the industrial 

 efficiency, in modern words, would be improved). 



Yet we wonder that the offspring of stock descended from workers 

 under these conditions, which certainly improved as the century ad- 

 vanced but were far from ideal, gave the high yield of C3 lads recorded 

 in the National Service Eeport. We might have been prepared for the 

 disclosure, as the pre-war records of countries with Conscription showed 

 that the number of rejections for the Army of town and factory workers 

 was far in excess of those for men drawn from country districts. But 

 evidence of the state of the national physique is not confined to these war 

 figures. Sir George JNewman, in his valuable and interesting Eeport on 

 Preventive Medicine, has drawn attention to the enormous amount of 

 time which is annually lost through sickness. The minimum average 

 amounted to 14,295,724 weeks (or a period of upwards of 270,000 years) 

 of sickness per annum, and this figure did not include absence from 

 work due to maternity benefit, sanatorium treatment, or absence for 

 less than four days per patient. This is the evidence of the National 

 Health Insurance. 



The design of the organism which has to stand the strain is not 

 at fault. It is an organism which, in the language of the 

 engineer, is abundantly supplied with factors of safety, and 

 has an over-all high factor of safety. The body is not designed merely 

 to perform the minimum amount of work or to stand the minimum 

 strain ; there is always a reserve. We have a circulatory 

 system which is beautifully balanced to meet a strain, a system of 

 vessels whose calibre can be increased or diminished so that the blood 

 may be mobilised at the tissues or organs which require it, and a heart 

 which has the capacity, provided it is normal and healthy, of responding 

 to work, whose rate may be trebled in a few seconds when oxygen 

 must be obtained and carbon dioxide got rid of. Not only can the 

 amount of blood which is passed through the lungs during hard work 

 be increased some five times, but the amount of oxygen taken in may 



