Labour and childhood / by Margaret McMillan.

  • Margaret McMillan
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Labour and childhood / by Margaret McMillan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    overwork. These play the greatest part in fixing the death and disease rate of the country. It is because of poverty and its train that evils are created, which must be met and paid for at a heavy rate. Asylums, prisons, schools for the feeble-minded, refuges, and homes for the homeless; all these are costly. And yet they are mainly the fruits of want! Poverty reduces some well-endowed children to the condition of creatures deprived of the upper brain.1 In forcing children to toil it destroys the intelligence of the brilliantly endowed (at least 14 per cent of the wage-earning children of London are reckoned to be above the average when they begin wage-earning), and it is one of the great causes of the drink craving. For that craving betrays a primal want in the case of thousands—though not of all drinkers—the want of food. In a late number of The Journal of Inebriety we read that the true 1 Dr. Arkell, who examined school children in Liverpool, writes: “ If I told one of these (of the poorest) to open its mouth it would take no notice until the request became a command, which sometimes had to be accompanied by a slight shake to draw the child’s attention. Then the mouth would be slowly opened widely, but no effort would be made to close it again until the child was told to do so. As an experiment I left one child with its mouth wide open the whole time I examined it—about four minutes—and it never once shut it. Now that shows a condition something like what one gets with a pigeon that has had its higher brain centres removed, and is a very sad thing to see in a human being.”
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