Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/204



large manufacturing centers the ethnic type is to a great extent a misshapen being. The form is stoop-shouldered, the legs bowed, the gait shambling, the eye dim and the skin pallid. Dispensary physicians treat yearly multitudes of children afflicted with rickets and malformations, either congenital or acquired.

When more attention than ever before is paid to physical culture, what omission, what physiological hindrances does each distorted human figure stand for? It represents, alas! wrong living perhaps for generations, privation, lack of proper food, hereditary weakness or disease, disabilities caused by overwork and strained posture, and oftener still an uncared-for childhood, the burdened or indifferent industrial mother being too absorbed to prevent her babe from walking prematurely or injuring itself for life by falls. On the other hand, over-zealous care and active mismanagement of infants work as much harm as neglect does. Ignorant how to hold her child, the parent causes its body to be crooked and its spine twisted by dragging it on one arm while she, poor creature! cooks, cleans, eats and sews with the other, pressing the wailing mite all day against her hot, unhealthful bosom and smothering it at night under her heavy covers. The offspring of the poor, seldom out of arms for the first twelve months, are too sedulously "minded" by awkward little sisters and brothers to permit fair play for nature's processes of growth, muscular exertion and rest. These nurses themselves, frail, tiny, almost infantile, become stunted or deformed from carrying heavy babes; for, from mistaken kindness, the last heir is rarely laid on a pillow or propped in a chair, unhugged and unhampered. If there be a grandmother in the family, two able-bodied women often take turns in holding one perfectly normal child, which under incessant handling soon becomes a morbid little atom. Clothing is piled on its puny body while in all weather Rh