Thus the well-known preacher and lecturer, Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, of Brooklyn, New York:[108]
“Many forms of public charity, from a scientific viewpoint, seem a curse, while wars and many industries seem the enemies of the blood of the nation.... The national physique has suffered an incalculable loss. In one factory town [in England] the military commission, examining young men for the South African War, rejected nineteen out of twenty, because of some defect in the eyes or lungs or legs.”
It is to be remembered that many thousands of men who report for examination as candidates for military service are so evidently defective that no formal examination is necessary for their prompt rejection. It is also important to consider the fact that there are many thousands of men who would gladly join the army, but make no application, knowing well, in advance, that they would be rejected as unfit. Thus the statistics showing that a large per cent. of those reporting to the military department as candidates for the service are “rejected on examination,” even these statistics do not fully reveal the unfortunate condition of affairs. In ten of the largest cities of England and Scotland in the year ending September 30, 1907, there were 34,808 applicants for admission to the army. Forty-seven per cent. of these applicants were rejected as physically unfit.[109] Of course, the percentage of rejections would have been far heavier if all had applied who would have been glad to join the army.
The next generation of English working-class people will probably be far more physically defective than the present generation.
In Westham public school (London) it was recently found:
“... That 87 per cent. of the infants and 70 per cent. of the older children were below the normal physique. These were all children of the dockers.
“Neglecting the kindly and assuageable problem of rural poverty, we seem driven to the conclusion that some seven and a half millions of people are at the present moment in England living below the poverty line—a problem which if only definitely realized in its squalid immensity is surely enough to stagger humanity.”[110]
In England, because of the physical decline of the working class, the Government has so much difficulty in finding a sufficient number of sound men to fill the ranks that it has been necessary, since the Battle of Waterloo, to repeatedly lower the physical requirements for enlistment.