THE DEGENERACY OF CITY CHILDREN.
DR. FERGUSSON, certifying Surgeon under the Factory Acts at Bolton, has revived an old and important dis- cussion in a somewhat novel form. Thirty years ago the public was horrified by accounts, most of them true, of the stunted condition of the children in factories, of their liability to scrofulous diseases, and of their feebleness from overwork. It was said that the race was degenerating rapidly, that the standard of height was being lowered in factory towns, and that the evil threatened to increase, each generation losing something of its pristine strength and vitality. A certain proportion of these statements was due, no doubt, to prejudice, to the belief of country gentlemen that sallowness means sick- ness—though Jews are the healthiest race in the world—and to ignorance of the change of type produced by life in crowded cities; but official inquiry revealed, if not degeneracy, at least a terrible liability to disease, among overworked children, and by a series of Acts, beginning with the 7th and 8th Victoria, cap. 15, the employers were compelled to dismiss all children under nine, to reduce the hours for all children under thirteen, and to place their "hands," whether children or adults, under better sanitary conditions. The Acts, though violently opposed by the employers, were warmly supported by the operatives, by scientific men, and by country gentlemen—who, however, did not extend them to agricultural labourers—and they were in a measure successful. Dr. Fergusson allows that the mills are now, for the most part, healthy. He does not think that the labour now exacted is too much for healthy children of thirteen, and he deprecates, as we understand him, any rise in the limit of age. But he maintains that in spite of the Acts the race of factory hands is degenerating. He has observed their children for forty years, and examined them professionally for fourteen, with great care—care increased by a mistaken idea that he had a right to forbid weak children of thirteen from working full time—and he is convinced, as he told a Committee of the House of Commons on Saturday, that they rapidly degenerate. He kept careful records, and he found that the proportion of children physically unfit for work at the age of thirteen increased from year to year, until in the five years ending 1873 he felt himself compelled to reject one- half the children of thirteen as physically unfit to work full time. When set to work they never grew, and did not increase a pound-weight in six months. The Acts had, in fact, failed to secure what their advocates hoped, a fairly healthy race of children, who might be relied on to transmit their health to their descendants. To remove any suspicion that he was pre- judiced or accustomed to demand too high a standard, he stated that his colleagues Dr. Settle and Mr. Garstang entirely agreed with his views upon the subject.
At first sight, this seems a most disheartening account. It is next to a certainty that physical inferiority is a transmissible quality ; it is probable that a physically inferior race will, un- less crushed from the outside, continue existing ; and it is pos- sible, though not proved, that inferiority is progressive, down at least to a point at which the frame becomes, so to speak, acclimatised to its injurious conditions. Dr. Fergusson's evi- dence therefore points to a continuous deterioration, under which our manufacturing cities will be filled by an under-sized race of men, usually sickly and incapable of the rougher and more necessary kinds of labour, and under a permanent temptation
to drink hard, the drink, again, incapacitating them still further. That is an unpleasant prospect even to men who, remembering how the little Roman swordsmen conquered the world, and how excellent a soldier the sallow costermonger makes, do not exaggerate the advantages conferred 'by a large physique. If we do not want a big race of men, we do want a healthy one, and a sober one, and though little men may be healthy, stunted men very rarely possess an average vitality. It is the more un- pleasant, because if the evil is proved—and nobody doubts it, though observers differ as to its extent—it cannot be remedied in the old way. Men must dwell in cities, however fast they die there, and the conditions of factory labour cannot be very much improved. The Legislature can do little more to secure either better mills, or shorter hours, or a later term for be- ginning labour. The mills are as healthy as they can be made, half-time is universal in factory towns, and if we enlarged the legal term of childhood to fourteen we might not secure much gain. The children who suffer seem from Dr. Fergusson's evidence to be worn out before they reach that age, and the object is to prevent their wearing out.
It is satisfactory, therefore, to find that Dr. Fergusson, while exposing the evil, assigns it to a cause other than those inherent in factory life. Like all philanthropists of his kind, he pushes investigation perhaps too far, but still he points to a definite and exceedingly probable cause of the mischief admittedly at work. We cannot follow him altogether when he says the cause is intemperance, for on the whole, the children of the last generation, outside factories, were as large as their race had ever been, and they were descended from men who drank harder than the workmen do now. The children of drinking colliers and navvies are not puny people. Nor can we quite accept the fact that factory lads between twelve and twenty smoke or chew tobacco as a reason for factory children under thir- teen being unable to work full time. The young ones have not been chewing, nor is there any evidence that the girls, who do not chew, are so much less feeble than the boys, who do. Dr. Fergusson, in fact, makes no distinction between them, and the proportion of girls who attended his office to obtain certifi- cates must, if Bolton is like other manufacturing towns, con- siderably exceed that of boys. And Dr. Fergusson can hardly be right in overlooking one main cause of the present debility of factory children of thirteen, namely, the immense increase of puny children, who ought by the laws of nature to have died, but who are permitted, by the new sanitary arrangements of our towns, by the improved health of their mothers, and by the higher wages of their fathers, to retain their lives. But we can well believe his main assertion that the feeble physique is owing in part to a change of diet of the most injurious kind. The children of the poor, who thirty or forty years ago were all brought up to drink milk, now drink tea without milk at every meal, and fail in consequence to develope either bone or muscle. Dr. Fergusson had this tested in the case of many sickly children, and found that those who were allowed milk twice a day grew nearly four times as fast. There can be no doubt that this loss of milk, which is nearly universal, and extends to the country as well as to the town, is the greatest loss that children have sus- tained, and unfortunately it is nearly irremediable. In the country milk can only be obtained by the poor with great trouble and exertion, even when, as is now rarely the case, the farmers will sell it to them, and in cities it is far too expensive for habitual use. A good supply of milk to a household with four children would cost nearly as much as meat, and to pre- scribe a milk diet to a factory lad of twelve is as sensible as to prescribe champagne. The only remedy is to discover some article of diet which supplies nearly all the same requisites, and then—a much harder task—to prevail on the population to feed their children with it. They unluckily despise the cheapest and most nourishing diet they can get, oatmeal porridge, and it would fequire all the exertions of those who influence them to remove a dislike as unreasonable as that which deters them from Australian meat. Still the prejudice must be removable, and so must the greatest difficulty in the way of bringing up children in great towns,—the slight opportunity for healthy exercise. Gymnastic training is not a perfect substitute for country life, but it is a substitute, and it could be provided more or less effectively in every national school. With a sound diet and habitual exercise, children in decently-drained towns ought neither to die nor live a decrepid, sickly race ; or if they suffer themselves from seden- tary work, ought to transmit their natural vigour, and not their acquired weakness, to their immediate descendants.
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