Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/195

 So much for the well-to-do children, who would seem from this table to get the better of disease entirely by the time they are nine or ten, though, as a matter of fact, this is not exactly what happens. What happens is that the sickly or defective do not go forward. Still, the table is cheering as showing how vigorous, on the whole, and how bold, is the upward swing of life.

The same upward movement is found in the elementary school, though it is not, unhappily, so striking there.

What part school doctoring has played in helping this upward movement we cannot yet learn—absolutely. There are other means of marking it, however, than the gathering of statistics, important as these are. Happily there is no need to wait long, no need to be an expert, in order to make every-day observations. These are made, and they are after all so reliable, generally speaking, that we all live and