A Poverty Problem by L. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Jul 6, 1905

A Poverty Problem

By L. A. S.

A CONDITION of affairs which has an important bearing on the question of “race suicide,” is pointed out by a contributor to the New York Independent, Mr. John Spargo, who states facts and figures carefully gathered by him relative to “the underfed children in our public schools.” Such children are, Mr. Spargo shows, much more numerous than is generally supposed, and he quotes authority for the opinion that upon them the educational effort of the public schools is largely thrown away.

Chief among the causes of this evil in the public educational system, is poverty. “Our national complacency has received a severe shock, or a series of shocks,” he says, “in the form of the revelation of a growing and menacing poverty problem of vast dimensions. The terrible, sinister, challenging phrase, ‘ten millions in poverty,’ alarms us. Some phases of the poverty problem we have studied and familiarized ourselves with, but its relation to our future exigency, the children upon whom we lavish so much money and effort for their education, we have neglected.”

“Mr. Robert Hunter’s estimate that in New York City from sixty to seventy thousand school children suffer from underfeeding,” Mr. Spargo says, “has caused something of a sensation.” But “it is not,” he adds, “a question of sixty or seventy thousand underfed school children in New York, but of nearly three million children in the United States underfed, and suffering in consequence from under-development physically and mentally. Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Jersey City, these and scores of other cities are, equally in proportion to their size, confronted by this grave problem.”

Mr. Spargo says that “few, if any, will disagree with Superintendent W. H. Maxwell of the New York public schools when he says: ‘Education, whether physical or mental, is seriously retarded, if not practically impossible, when the body is improperly or imperfectly nourished. That mental underdevelopment commonly attends physical underdevelopment is a physiological fact too firmly established and too obvious for argument.’”

In conclusion, Mr. Spargo observes that “it is trite to say that no nation can allow its children to go underfed. That means national peril and decay. There is no greater ‘race suicide’ than that.”

L. A. S.