Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/35

 Rh influence of factory life is more often to retard growth than to cause a complete cessation of it.

Interesting deductions might also be drawn from the relation of the height to the weight in any class, by which we may determine to some degree when and how these degenerative influences become effective. Thus clerks, as a class, are above the average stature, but below it in weight. This follows because these men are recruited from a social group where the influences during the period of growth are favorable. The normal stature was attained at this time. The unfavorable circumstances have come into play later through the sedentary nature of the occupation, and the result is a deficiency in weight. The case of grooms given above is exactly the reverse of this, for they became grooms because they were short, but have gained in weight afterward because the occupation was favorable to health.

These differences in stature within the community offer a cogent argument for the protection of our people by means of well-ordered factory laws. The Anthropological Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science delaresdeclares [sic], as a result of its detailed investigation, that the protection of youth by law in Great Britain has resulted in the gain of a whole year's growth for the factory children. In other words, a boy of nine years in 1873 was found to equal in weight and in stature one of ten years of age in 1833. This is nature's reward for the passage of laws presumably better than the present so-called "beneficent" statute in South Carolina which forbids upward of eleven hours' toil a day for children under the age of fourteen. In every country where the subject has been investigated—in Germany, in Russia, in Austria, Switzerland, or Great Britain—the same influence is shown. Fortunately, the advance out of barbarism is evidenced generally by a progressive increase in the stature of the population as an accompaniment of the amelioration of the lot of the masses, which is certainly going on decade by decade, absolutely if not relatively. There is no such change taking place among the prosperous and well-to-do. It is the masses which are, so to speak, catching up with the procession. It offers a conclusive argument in favor of the theory that the world moves forward.

One of the factors akin to that of occupation which appears to determine stature is the unfavorable influence of city life. The general rule in Europe seems to be that the urban type is physically degenerate. This would imply, of course, not the type which migrates to the city on the attainment of majority, or the type which enjoys an all-summer vacation in the country, but the urban type which is born in the city, and which grows up in such environment, to enter a trade which is also born of town life.