Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/228

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LABOUR AND CHILDHOOD

themselves, are exposed every day to the risk of contact with disease and impurity. The new education discounts the results, however favourable on paper, of a system that ignores this. It recognizes that the creative power is within that gave us all we possess—that it reveals itself in the healthy, the growing, the vigorous, in whom the upward movement of life is not checked. In short, the new education is physiological.

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The school doctor is free to take a limited view of his own functions. Even then they must appear to him to have a great social significance. Even if he does no more than condemn insanitary buildings, and insist on the prompt treatment of simple ailments, he must feel that this is something—that it is a great thing.

But among the ranks of members of the new profession there must be some whose thoughts will take a wider range.

These may think, perhaps, of the children of the rich as well as of the children of the poor. To-day the papers are filled with details of the family history and physique of a millionaire homicide. A learned counsel has read nearly every book on the physiology of the nerves, and, armed with it,