This Famishing World

By Alfred W. McCann

§ 8 -- Denatured Foods Destroy Life

ANIMALS, human or dumb brutes, die when their food is debased, but the very number of such foods makes it impossible for an individual to go before a grand jury with the charge: "This food killed my little girl."

For months, perhaps for years, one juggled food brought substances to her diet which her little body could not use. Her vitality in throwing off the excess baggage was slowly sapped.

She was not poisoned by any particular food. A combination of inadequate foods merely robbed her tissues of their tone.

Another food from another source had been processed in a manner that removed some or all of its most indispensable elements. In its refinement it withheld from her little frame the very materials she required for growth, materials that God had elaborated for her, but which unnatural practices had withdrawn from her reach on the vain assumption that it is not necessary to credit the Creator with a profoundly conceived and marvellously executed scheme of biochemic balances and harmonies.

Persistently, month after month, the disordered combination of artificial foods sallied to the dinner table, where all the forces of outraged nature were called into battle with the unseen enemy of health and life.

Commercial expediency looked on as the fight was waged with nature but nature had been equipped with poor fighting materials and the child's resistance, broken at last by the combined attack of unsuspected enemies, buckled, snapped and was gone.

There is no pathologist, no public prosecutor, no father or mother who can accuse the food industry of her death. Let this be fully understood.

Before we can correct a single refined food abuse, by law, we must produce in court the body of a dead child, and prove that life was destroyed by a particular food.

Scientists will be on hand to testify in behalf of the defendant. Food manufacturers have been paying scientists for twenty-five years to testify in their defence.

I have listened on hundreds of occasions to their testimony in adulterated food cases, and in many instances I have seen their sophistries fail, but the facts have rarely been reported to the public.

The fear of advertising losses, as we have seen, has closed the columns of most newspapers and magazines to the truth.

Judges, confused by the conflicting testimony of experts, have in numerous instances imposed fines of $5 upon wretches for preserving milk with formaldehyde; for salvaging the flesh of diseased animals for human food.

Not a word of these heinous crimes or the travesty of justice which flows from them filters out to the public.

Cases in which deadly wood alcohol has formed the base of vanilla, lemon and other flavouring extracts have been dismissed with a suspended sentence, not a soul outside the court room hearing an echo of the facts.

Confectioners who have used arsenical preparations in the glaze with which their penny candies were weather-proofed have been let off with trifling rebukes, and the public has been none the wiser.

Foods that kill mice, rabbits and guinea pigs are not "harmful" to the child in the law's eyes, for the reason that nobody is willing to feed a child on an exclusive diet of such things until it dies, in order thereby to produce, as evidence, a dead body in court.

Fortunately, when it is argued that chickens or other experimental animals are not human beings, and that therefore any deduction based on barnyard phenomena are unwarranted when applied to humanity, we are not confined to animal experimentation for our facts.

The same facts have been established in the most startling and dramatic fashion, hundreds of times, upon human beings. The fascinating narratives which these human poison squad experiences provide for our enlightenment and use will be related here in all their significances. Dramatists and novelists have strangely overlooked the intense human interest with which these weird episodes literally scintillate and thus the general public has never heard of them.

In Billibid Prison, Philippine Islands, 1912, twenty-nine criminals under sentence of death were fed exclusively on refined and denatured foods of the kind most common in America for the purpose of determining the effect of such diet.

Their chief food consisted of polished rice. In six weeks the condemned men became anemic. Their first symptom was slight edema (water-logging or swelling) of the feet and ankles which disappeared after lying down. Puffiness beneath the eyes, with general weakness and pains in the legs, soon followed.

Later the edema became massive, involving even the thighs. Then came marked apathy with muscular wasting and extreme pallor. Finally, an enlargement of the heart with feeble heart action.

It is noteworthy that the symptoms of war edema reported among German, French and British soldiers, 1916-1918, are identical with these.

Commenting on the Billibid experiments, Drs. R. P. Strong and R. C. Crowell stated: "These diseases developed owing to the absence of some substance or substances in the diet necessary for the normal physiological processes of the body. Without a supply of such substances in the food sickness results." This comment in all its vagueness disclosed the poverty of food knowledge possessed by the medical profession six years ago.

The prisoners fed on the denatured diet mingled freely with the other prisoners but there was no tendency of the disease to spread outside the group fed on the polished rice.

When this denatured food was removed from their diet and whole natural brown rice restored to them, they recovered promptly.

These are the brief outlines of facts of which you will learn much in striking detail before we have proceeded far. They are cited here only for the purpose of emphasising the ignorance existing as late as 1912 among men who although devoting their lives to the cure of disease did not suspect its cause.

In the near future, depending upon the rapidity with which the truth is spread, it will not be so difficult to bring the body of a dead child into the court room to prove with evidence that cannot be controverted that the murder was committed by depraved food.

§ 9 -- Human Variations of a Divine Theme

Perhaps you have heard of the little girl who caught cold easily, and whose mother for that reason kept her home from school on rainy days.

From the pages of "Starving America" published, 1913, by George H. Doran Company, of which work this is an elaborate extension, I again present her to you for the reason that she symbolises millions of her kind.

She went one day to a playmate's birthday party at a neighbour's home. Set before the children was a great frosted cake with lighted candles; ice cream bricks striped with red, white, green and brown; candies of seven hues, and a riotous assortment of goodies that struggled with each other in a debauch of colour to catch the attention of greedy little eyes.

The little merry-makers were transported by the rainbow sweets before them. Angel cake and wafers were consumed without end.

That night the tired but happy little darling was tucked away in her warm little bed by little mother, who was happy too.

In her sleep she fretted and tossed a bit. The next day she did not seem well enough to be sent to school. Toward evening a slight fever had developed.

Her mother called it an "upset."

The fever continued into the second day and the doctor was called. He felt her pulse, looked at her tongue, and asked what she had been eating.

When the party was described he smiled and said: "She has eaten too much."

He gave her medicine and in a few days she was "well."

The doctor had not taken into consideration the fact that the milk of which that richly decorated ice cream had been made was raw milk; he did not know that a microscopical examination of it would have revealed millions of organisms to the cubic centimeter, much less than a teaspoonful.

He did not attach much importance to the fact that many of those organisms were of the pathogenic or disease-producing type, and that the simple but effective remedy against them, pasteurisation, had not been applied.

He little heeded the fact that once infected, neither milk nor its products, ice cream and butter, are made safe by anything but pasteurisation or sterilisation.

He did not recall that low temperature or even freezing has no effect on the disease germs of milk, and does not destroy the tuberculosis, typhoid and diphtheria bacilli, the highest exponents of milk-borne infection.

He did not know that the ice cream, sent in from a store, was stiffened with a bodifier made of commercial gelatine, more truthfully classified as carpenters' glue, which the Bureau of Chemistry at Washington has found to contain as many as 6,000,000,000 organisms to the gram, of which there are twenty-nine in a single ounce.

He did not know that glue, containing sulphites, copper and arsenic was originally intended as wall paper sizing, or for use in the paper box factory or furniture shop, but that through the cupidity of the wholesale bakers' supply houses it had been appropriated for use in confectionery, ice cream and cake.

He did not know that the marshmallows consumed by the child consisted of glue, sugar and a coal tar dye.

He did not know that the coloured candies were made chiefly of glucose, sweetened with 10 or 15 percent of sugar, flavoured with ethereal extracts and ornamented with ribbon dyes.

He did not know that the soft drinks, pop, consumed by the child were sweetened with saccharine, contained soap bark for "suds," were coloured with dye, preserved with salicylic acid, benzoic acid or formic acid, and flavoured with esters, ethers and aldehydes.

He did not know that small town "pop," as well as big city "pop," contains as a rule not a single ingredient recognised as food.

He did not know the destructive action of refined glucose and refined sugars when excessively consumed.

He did not know that on such a diet bees are quickly killed, though it has been generally supposed that an abundance of table syrup and granulated sugar is good food for the child.

He had read something of the high calorie value of sugar, and glucose, but had not stopped to consider that alcohol and gasoline have a much higher calorie value.

He did not know, as we are going to discover a little later, that "high calories" although a scientific phrase, is not only meaningless but dangerous when applied to food as it is being applied to-day.

The little party as a single instance of childhood dissipation did no particular harm to its victim except perhaps to infect her through the ice cream with the germ of bovine tuberculosis, although every time she consumed a glass of raw milk of unknown origin at home she encountered the same danger.

The significance of the little birthday party lay in the fact that all the delicacies served to the romping children were merely typical, under other forms, of the refined foods so generously incorporated in the every day diet of the American people.

We are to learn why our little girl caught cold so easily, and why it seemed difficult to cure those colds, and why she had so many periodical "upsets." Of what did her breakfast consist?

There was, of course, the usual coffee, which no child should ever consume, and the usual rolls, toast or pancakes with glucose syrup, with one of the many popular breakfast foods served with milk produced by cows fed on brewers' grain, beet pulp, distillery waste, cotton seed meal and gluten feed, a by-product of the glucose factory, compounded black strap feeds, containing ground corn cob, oat hulls, peanut shells, buckwheat hulls, cottonseed hulls, rice hulls, cocoa shells, chaff, elevator screenings, shredded straw, plant refuse, dirt and sand.

"Is this not the breakfast of millions?" you ask.

Of what did the "breakfast-food" consist?

Breakfast foods made of wheat, corn, barley and rice must "keep"; they must "look nice."

The corn flakes, the farina served under trade names in fancy packages at high prices but purchasable in bulk without the fancy names at half the price, and the puffed rice are merely other forms of angel cake and wafer without the sugar and eggs.

They represent but the starchy part of the grain from which the many wonderful substances we are about to describe have been removed for commercial reasons.

At noon, as father did not come home for lunch, mother fried the potatoes from last evening's meal, and perhaps added a bit of bologna in which in the uninspected establishments, of which there are thousands in the United States, the raw flesh of the rejected dairy culls (old and diseased cows) is utilised.

White bread and margarine, with syrup, were present in abundance. They were always present!

§ 10 -- Natural Immunity Versus Business

Our little girl liked white bread or biscuits, deluged with table syrup, for lunch. Her mother did not know what life-sustaining substances had been removed from the bread and the biscuits, or what had been taken out of the hydrolised corn starch that produced the syrup.

She also liked jam purchased from the store, with its 10 percent of fruit and its 10 percent of apple juice, made from the sulphured skins and cores of the dried apple industry; with its 70 percent of glucose, sweetened with 10 percent of sugar, held together with sufficient phosphoric acid to supply the jellying quality, and preserved with the classic one-tenth of 1 percent of benzoate of soda to prevent the mass from disintegrating.

You did not think such jam as this is to be found in America.

Examine the fine print on the labels of the jars sold in the stores; examine the fine print on the labels of the thirty-pound pails sold as "pie filler" and "cake filler" to the baker. More than 70 percent of all the commercial jam consumed is exactly like this.

Our little victim liked the bright strawberry hue of the sweetish stuff. This hue had been contributed through the legal use of a coal tar dye known as amranth. Only one-tenth of 1 percent of benzoate of soda was declared in fine print on the label, and her mother had never noticed even that.

Before the war, when benzoate of soda did not cost $5 a pound, the presence of as much as five-tenths of 1 percent in many foods was determined by the Commissioner of Agriculture of the State of Georgia. The facts were reported to the state chemist in serial No. 56.

To-day formic acid and other preservatives less costly are secretly employed.

The little girl's doctor did not know this; moreover he was not worried by the presence of a little benzoate in her jam.

She was also fond of pickles, hardened in a bath of alum, the astringency of which prevents the softening of their tissues.

Her father and mother had not been taught the chemistry of food in the schools, nor the relationship which refined food, juggled food, and drugged food might some day bear to their anemic child.

The evening meal was well suited to the father's needs. It consisted of chops or pot roast or sausages or baked beans and ham, or liver and bacon, or kidney stew, with vegetables and a bakery pie, or a home-made pudding, white with corn starch and milk or brown with corn starch and chocolate, or pink with ribbon dye.

The ever-present white bread and something that resembled butter was, of course, consumed in abundance. It was the average American meal as you shall see from authority much higher than mine, government authority, and it is the average American meal with which we are concerned.

During the afternoon a candy shop down the street received many of the pennies of the little girl. It had existence for the purpose of attracting those pennies. At least twenty-million such pennies are spent each day in the United States by school children.

Thus she feasted between meals on dyed glucose and chemical flavours, with an occasional ice cream soda to add romance to her little life.

Delicate always, anemic and "nervous," she had been treated by the family physician for tonsillitis, acute chorea and anemia. At the age of six she underwent an operation for adenoids. Every year among children there are more than 200,000 such operations in the United States.

She had also taken a tonic of iron and manganese. Remember these words, "iron" and "manganese."

On other occasions tonics of strychnia were prescribed.

Her teeth, like those of millions of children, were decayed. Mother was anxious about her, and at times would say, "I wonder if we feed Helen properly?" But Aunt Jennie always answered, "Her ills are natural to childhood, and are to be expected. The sooner she has them all the sooner she will be done with them."

Moreover, the neighbours told mother that the less attention she paid to her child's food the better, because people who were always worrying about food had the toughest luck. Here and there a "plump" child was pointed out as a model of what eating "anything and everything" would produce.

The neighbours did not know that water-logged tissues are frequently mistaken for plumpness, or that plumpness has nothing to do with muscle tone, with normal functioning of the glands, with vitality or resistance to disease.

The neighbours did not know that the "plump" child, fed on "anything and everything," succumbs more quickly than the well-fed, muscular but thin child.

Grandmothers and mothers had fed children for ages, and surely they must know a little about their business, so after all little Helen's mother felt that the child would eventually outgrow her poor health. "She just wasn't strong" but "would get strong." It was a comforting thought.

A few weeks after the little party, as Helen was going home from school, she was caught in a rainstorm. Mother changed her clothes promptly upon her arrival and gave her hot lemonade.

There was another fever and the doctor was called. When he came he uttered one word, "pneumonia."

We now know, for the Census Director at Washington has told us, that every year in the United States 400,000 children under ten years of age are buried, as little Helen was buried.

Such are the facts. They cannot be disputed.

The apparent cause of the child's death was pneumonia; the real cause was malnutrition, followed by low resistance and inability to fight off the pneumococci.

Man's methods of endowing his children with natural immunity unfortunately involve a side issue of "business expediency." God's methods disclose no such taint. By following the divine hints that lie at his feet man can still have his business without the tragedy on which it is built.

§ 11 -- The Neglected Child of 1912 -- The Soldier of 1918

We have learned with shocking surprise that in the last mortality statistics issued by the Census Director at Washington, there were reported in the United States for one year the deaths of 400,000 children under ten years of age.

The record of these deaths was compiled in what is known as the "registration area," which included only about 65 percent of the total population of the United States.

The total deaths in the "registration area" the year before the war, 1913, were 890,848, of which all but 70,644 were of white persons.

The "registration area" covered few Southern states in which the negro population is large. It is thus seen that the high mortality record of the negroes has in no manner affected these figures, which would be still larger if the negro population were taken into consideration, or if the entire country were reported upon instead of but two-thirds of it.

Lamenting the fatalities of war we are unmindful that during the past four years, while men on the battle-fields of Europe were being killed by fire and gas, 1,500,000 children under ten years of age were dying here at home in the United States.

Because they did not die in a massacre, their deaths failed to rouse the nation.

When the Titanic and the Lusitania went down with a few more than 2,000 souls aboard, the cities of civilization put on the cloak of grief. A few thousand perished, but they perished in a heap.

In one instance a block of ice, in another an enemy was responsible.

Following both catastrophes every newspaper in the United States poured into the streets millions of first page lamentations. Men were dazed because these tragedies came quick and sudden.

The slow-moving, deadlier peril that walks among their children by day and lies with them at night arouses no man.

As long ago as 1912 the United States Bureau of Education prepared a bulletin warning us that here in our own peaceful cities of America:

400,000 children had organic heart disease.
1,000,000 children had tuberculosis.
1,000,000 children had spinal curvature.
1,000,000 children had defective hearing.
4,000,000 children were suffering from malnutrition.
6,000,000 children had enlarged tonsils or other gland diseases.
10,000,000 children had defective teeth.
15,000,000 children needed attention for physical defects prejudicial to health.

Many of those children were then boys of fifteen. Since then they have passed through the medical examination of the draft of 1918. The defects of 1912 had become intensified during the interim. The re-examination of 1918 disclosed the nation's crime of neglect.

Yes, the neglected child of 1912 presented himself for efficient military service in 1918. The nation that had ignored his perils in peace expected him in war to step into line with a whole body.

Do you not think it time to ask the reason why these figures are on the books against us?

Do you not think it our duty to heed the truth and apply it?

To all who think so these words are addressed.

We know in the last year reported by the Census Directory at Washington, 159,435 infants under one year of age perished in the United States.

This sacrifice of infant life indicates that nearly 200,000 American women annually enter the shadows of motherhood unfit to bring their children into the world. The facts are brutal, but by ignoring them or by refusing to look into them because of the grim depression which accompanies the contemplation of such a holocaust, we betray our unworthiness of the sacrifice made by our sons and brothers on the fields of France.

They struggled and died to make the world a better place to live in. Shall we hesitate to match our living efforts against their blood?

By seeking the cause of America's slaughter of the innocents, in order to act upon it, we prove that in some measure at least we are worthy to account for our stewardship of the lives submitted to our care.

If, in 1918, a hostile army had invaded our shores to put to death 400,000 of our children as the Turks put to death the Armenians, as the Prussians put to death the Belgians, there would have been cause indeed for weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

That hostile army has invaded our shores, and is now ruthlessly destroying our children. It is the army of ignorance, indifference, complacency, selfishness, greed, materialism.

The crowds in the market places, in the cars, on the streets, in the theatres; the crowds scanning the casualty lists, hoping that the names of their loved ones would not be there, gave no thought even in the year of salvage, 1918, to the waste of life going on around them.

"With desolation is the earth made desolate, because no man thinketh in his heart."

Therefore we experience little indignation when self-appointed leaders declare an intolerance for what they describe as "mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life. Such is the philosophy of Madison Grant who holds that slaves are more fortunate than free men and the subjects of an aristocracy happier and better than the citizens of a democracy.

These anti-American doctrines are advanced boldly by the councillor of the American Geographical Society and a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History in his "The Passing of the Great Race," published, 1916.

From such doctrines what shall America expect?

§ 12 -- What Our Teeth Disclose

Although more than 100,000 deaths from tuberculosis are reported in the United States every year, these figures represent only the number who perish, not the number afflicted or incapacitated.

In the last year reported, covering but two-thirds of the population, 58,973 died of diarrhea. This number does not include those who were stricken during the year and recovered.

Indicating fatal cases it also discloses the wide prevalence of dietetic folly in non-fatal cases.

Cancer, rapidly increasing, was responsible for 49,928 deaths. The American Society for the Control of Cancer through Dr. Charles E. Lakeman, reported in 1915 that we then had 80,000 new cases each year in the United States.

Bright's disease, also increasing, with acute nephritis, was responsible for 65,106 deaths.

Cancer and Bright's disease, both of which are now being traced to food abuses, in one year were responsible for 135,034 deaths, leaving hundreds of thousands of victims in the valley straddled by lingering death.

Diabetes also is on the increase.

Before abandoning these facts established by the Census Director at Washington, let us consider two diseases -- cancer of the stomach and heart disease -- both of which take a progressively heavier toll every year.

The rate for 1913 was the highest for any year during the period dating from 1900, just as the rate for 1912 was the highest shown for any previous year.

The rate for 1917 shows a steady and continuous climb, and thus far in the mortality statistics kept by the City of New York for 1918, the increase actually smudges the chart on which it is recorded.

The Census Director declares: "It is probable that many deaths reported as due to 'tumour' are in reality caused by cancer, but as far as the cancer total is concerned they are not included."

When this fact is considered with the fact that the "registration area" comprises only 65.1 percent of the total population, it is evident that we have in the United States a great many more cases of fatal cancer than are disclosed.

The Census Director continues: "Approximately 40 percent of all deaths from this disease were returned as cancer of the stomach and liver."

These facts tend strongly to support the convictions of Packard to the effect that refined and demineralised foodstuffs are directly responsible for the prevalence of cancer.

Of the 87,755 deaths charged to organic diseases of the heart, the Census Director states: "The tendency has been toward increase in the death rates from heart disease from year to year, and the rates for the latter years are well in excess of those of earlier years."

It will be well to remember that in all disorders of nutrition involvement of the heart is among the first symptoms. Acidosis and anemia which are widespread but notoriously neglected food deficiency diseases, are always accompanied by abnormal heart action, the true cause of which is rarely suspected, and still more rarely reckoned with.

The extraordinary facts about to be presented all tend to prove that cancer, Bright's disease, acute nephritis, diabetes, tuberculosis and organic diseases of the heart are directly attributable to food deficiencies in a land that literally overflows with an abundance of food of a kind that supplies all these deficiencies.

Of course, when 400,000 children under ten years of age die in their American homes every year there is an involvement of the living who still maintain that minimum of vitality necessary to hold them this side the dead line.

We need not speculate as to the prevalence of disease and pain. All over America and Europe public school children are being examined by physicians in search of disease.

Half the children in a school in Leeds were found by Dr. Hull suffering from mineral starvation. Their food had been refined.

Before the war 40 percent of the children in the Edinburgh schools were found suffering from diseases of the ear.

Of 10,500 school children examined, the British Dental Association found 86 percent suffering from defective teeth, the result of a diet lacking in the mineral substances upon which bones, teeth and tissues depend.

Those who refuse to accept this fact must deal with the results of the experiments of Dr. Geis of Columbia University in his analysis of the mineral content of defective teeth.

In the Dundee school 50 percent of the children were found suffering from defective vision. Of 42,750 children examined in 1911 by Dr. William J. Galvin, chief of the Division of Child Hygiene of the Boston Board of Health, 27,795 were described as "defective."

Of 1,694 children examined in six clinics, 1913, by Dr. A. Freedman Foot, eleven were found to possess normal teeth. Dr. Foot, in reporting to the Second District Dental Society of New York, declares: "The six-year molars of nearly every child were broken down wholly or in part. In many instances the molars were decayed through the gums. So extensive and far advanced were the defects that corrective treatment, even if it were applied, would have been of little value."

The New York Department of Health through Dr. T. Van Wincke examining the teeth of 231,081 school children of New York City, outside the dental clinics, found 131,747 defective.

What are the future health chances of these children? Are they to be useful to society or a drag upon the race? Will we need them for war in 1925?

If they really constitute our second line of defence, what are we doing to protect that line?

Full proof is at hand establishing the incontrovertible proposition that defective teeth or sound teeth may be had at will, depending entirely upon the character of food consumed prior to and during the entire period of dentition.

The same character of proof is at hand determining the fact that defective teeth constitute but one of the many symptoms of the grave systemic disorders traceable to refined food.

The American teeth of to-day are among the poorest on earth in spite of the great variety of foods which the American people enjoy.

"No nation was ever so well fed as America."

Alas! such flattery does not compensate for the infirmities so wilfully ignored. Flattery is a poor substitute for the riches God has provided for His children. Those riches are within reach. They are abundant. Our hands will soon be upon them.

§ 13 -- Why Have a Six-year Molar?

Sound teeth are the foundation of health building. The six-year molar is the corner-stone. The school children of America are building upon defective corner-stones or without corner-stones at all.

Why should God provide the six-year molar if He did not intend His creature to use it?

A hundred eminent authorities whose brilliant demonstrations have never been heard of by the plain people now stand on record with these statements: "Defective teeth are symptoms of malnutrition. They indicate that something is wrong with the food supply. The normally nourished possess sound teeth."

Notwithstanding the profound truth nested in this little cluster of words, no symptom of the national health is so grossly neglected as the symptom revealed by defective teeth, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of the soundness of the prophecy that if we persist in ignoring the underlying causes of these defects, America, in spite of the magnificence of her 1918 performances, is destined in 1948 to become a decadent nation.

In June, 1914, Dr. S. S. Goldwater, Commissioner of Health of New York City, ordered a physical examination of the employees of the Health Department.

Between June and October 240 men and 456 women employees were examined. These 696 individuals represented the average standard of American citizenship. Perhaps because of their education and environment they represented a standard a little higher than the average. At least they should have.

They were specialists in the kind of health-education which the American people now enjoy. As such they should have known something about their own health.

The average age of the men examined was thirty-three and one-half years; the average age of the women thirty-two years.

From the Department labourer to the highest executive officer, a variety of indoor, outdoor and mixed employment was represented.

The report of the examination declares: "One hundred and twenty-three were found to have defective digestion. Habitual constipation was found in the majority of these.

"A great number of young men (notwithstanding their highly polished shoes, carefully creased trousers, bright neckties and clean-shaven faces) suffered from this condition, which if allowed to go uninterrupted has baneful ultimate effects upon the blood vessels, kidneys, heart and nervous system."

In addition to constipation the cause of a hundred other preventable ills, 417 of the entire number suffered from defective vision, defective hearing and defective teeth. Ninety-two had heart disease. Many of these had valvular leakage of which they were entirely ignorant.

They had not died as infants, and they looked like healthy creatures, but within them the forces of destruction were working unseen and unsuspected.

Others, especially very young men with constipation and nervousness, had dilated left ventricles with unstable and rapid heart action. They were a fine, healthy, average looking lot, judged from the outside, and would seem to justify the comforting flattery of the average commentator upon the glory of American public health: "We are the best fed nation in the world."

Just such deceptive judgment calculating from the exterior only has inspired many American editors to idealise the "superb health" of their fellows.

Were it not for this dangerous attitude toward truth these symptoms would long ago have been interpreted in their true significance, and an honest effort might have been made to provide against them.

Self-flattery has blinded the nation, but the hundreds of thousands of "rejects" cast aside as "physically unfit" in the medical examination of our first draft of 1918 have opened the nation's eyes.

Of our 696 Health Department employees, 232 or exactly one-third were in obvious need of medical treatment, and 327 -- 44 percent -- were in need of medical advice.

Their diet had not saved them from the infirmities with which they were specialising, even though they had not been included among the 400,000 who as little children succumb every year in the United States to an untimely death.

Commenting on the Goldwater report, Dr. Charles D. Slade, who made the examinations, stated: "Forty-four percent of those examined had without their knowledge some vital physical defect which might have shortened their life by a number of years if undetected.

"Those in whom were discovered actual evidence of disease numbered 213 or nearly one-third the entire number."

There was not much self-justification for self-flattery there.

As we advance we shall discover less, but always shall we keep in mind the simple, acceptable, never-failing and truly divine formula, the abandonment of which is responsible for so much human infirmity, and the return to which means so much not only to America, but to that great part of the civilised world which believes in God and trusts Him.

§ 14 -- "Dust Thou Art and Unto Dust Thou Shalt Return"

"Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return" is a law of life, not a symbol of death.

Dr. Slade, continuing his comments upon the disquieting results of the examination of the health of the employees of the New York Department of Health, said: "The last ten years have recorded a general reduction in the general death rate in all ages under forty years, but there has been a simultaneous surprising increase in the death rate between forty and sixty years, due largely to digestive, circulatory and kidney diseases."

Back in 1898 New York City had an infant death rate, under one year of age, of 203 for every thousand born.

Heroic efforts to save these lives through the establishment of pasteurisation of milk, infant feeding stations and the work of visiting nurses had succeeded in reducing this death rate at the beginning of 1918 to 89 per thousand, a saving of 114 infant lives in every thousand born.

In 1917 the metropolis reported 141,564 births. In that year 16,139 baby lives were prolonged beyond the first year stage, after which little, if anything, was done for them.

The city "saved" them, glorified its records accordingly, and went about its business, giving no thought to their second year, their fifth year, their tenth year. Now it is focusing attention upon their fortieth year.

What kind of a system is it that will prolong the misery of frail little lives for a year and then pause in its work of redemption? It were better, perhaps, if the babies were allowed to die than to extend their miseries into unknown regions out of which they finally emerge with infirmities that cause them to curse the day they were snatched from the "infant mortality" class and flung into the "physically defective" class.

It were better far for us in our relations with God that we make no attempt to drag out the infirm lives of these weaklings of society unless we continue our work of restoring them to healthy, fruitful life.

Something of the truly inspiring experiences I have had in the physical redemption of broken boys who had been rescued from the "infant mortality" class wil1 be related here in good season.

Certain it is that all childhood infirmities lower efficiency, for which reason public school boards are ordering operations upon children's throats, removing adenoids, correcting defective vision, doing dental work, providing nurses, furnishing meals at cost, sending "cards of instruction" on hygiene and diet to parents.

The charge for these services is borne by the community.

Apparently if the work were not done under school direction it would not be done at all.

The state exercises vast and elastic powers in the regulation of public health and education. Why does the state make no attempt to search out the cause of the diseases with which it deals? Why does the state not warn the people against the hidden enemy that attacks them? Let me again repeat: the politicians, the food industries and the newspapers will not permit it.

Wherefore, it is the purpose of these words to set down a record of those common but deadly sins of diet which end inevitably in disease.

We shall have to review the nation's crimes against its wheat, corn, rye, rice and barley; against its bread, biscuits, crackers, cakes, rolls, rings, buns, wafers, doughnuts, crullers, pastry, pies, pancakes, puddings, sugars and starches; against its milk, butter, eggs, meat products, fish, poultry; against its molasses, dried fruits, condiments, candies, ice cream, jam, jellies and preserves. All of these foods could be and would be what they ought to be if we refused to tolerate the manipulation of the substitutes that go into them.

We shall tear down nothing without building up. When we are through it will be impossible to go astray in the selection and preparation of the most delicious, appetising and nutritious of foods for our families unless we wilfully decide to do so.

"Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return."

If we take a handful of fertile earth into the laboratory and split it into its component parts we find it composed chiefly of some sixteen elements.

If we take a measure of milk, an egg, a handful of wheat or corn, barley, oats or rye, again we find the same sixteen elements, plus at least two marvellous compounds elaborated by the plant, though not in the soil.

These compounds were not known in the modern laboratory until a few years ago, yet Moses proved by his instructions to the Jews that he was familiar with them.

They are called "fat soluble A" and "water soluble B." Without them man cannot live, yet he makes an almost fanatical effort, for business reasons, to keep them out of his diet, and succeeds in doing so in at least 80 percent of all the foods he eats. From his bread he succeeds in removing them entirely, depending solely upon benevolent chance to obtain them from "offsetting" foods about which he hears so much when he reads the reports of commercial scientists.

When we analyse the body of man we find that it, too, is made up principally of the same sixteen elements found in the soil and the plant. There is no creature alive on the face of this planet whose body does not contain these sixteen elements.

The constancy with which they appear in the soil, in the tissues of the plant and in man's own tissues, and the consistency with which they are found in all unrefined foods reveal the operation of a fixed and inviolable law.

The beauty of this law, as we are about to see, is almost as infinite as the Creator who set its processes in motion. The lore of the libraries contains nothing so bewildering in its fascination, and yet one may consult a million volumes and find no hint of its glory upon their pages.

The elements which operate under this law and which persist through fertile soil, healthy plants and man are oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, chlorine, fluorine, iron, phosphorus, calcium, potassium, magnesium, manganese, sodium, sulphur, silicon, iodine. There are nearly a hundred from which nature might choose but she clings tenaciously to these.

The human body obtains them through the medium of food, and through food alone.

From all the food refined for the use of the human body at least eight of them are removed entirely, and four others are removed to the extent of 75 percent.

In this clash with God and in all the miseries that flow from it we shall find the very heart of the marvels about to be unfolded.

Penetrating the circles of elemental nature for a few brief hours even the indifferent and the sceptical will behold an invincible defence against the deaths of the 400,000 children under ten years of age who perish in the United States every year; against the nameless pain that remains behind.

The disclosures of the War Department, July 27th, 1918, by Provost Marshal General E. H. Crowder are to be remembered as we enter the depths. The War Department's estimate of effectives obtainable by extending the draft ages from 18 to 45 confirm in startling figures all the facts thus far presented as to the number of physical defectives in the United States.

Of the 1,366,142 men available between the ages of 32 and 45 nearly 450,000 (435,378) are grouped as "physical rejects," leaving 601,236 men fit for service.

Of the 2,568,012 men available between the ages of 18 and 22 nearly 800,000 (770,403) are grouped as "physical rejects," leaving 1,797,609 men fit for service.

Here, then, are 2,568,012 mere boys of whom nearly a third have been broken on the wheel of infirmity, a number agreeing in depressing consistency with the averages adduced in all the other instances cited here.

Why should such appalling numbers of American youth, under standards of living for which so much is claimed, fall at their tender age into the "physically unfit" class?

And here are 1,036,614 men in their very prime, in the very flower of ripening manhood, of whom 42 percent, nearly half, have been blasted at the core.

In these two classes alone our War Department from a total of 3,604,626 weeds out at a time when stern necessity inspires less rigid physical examination, a full third (1,205,781) and casts them off. Most of these rejected men were ready to die if need be for the land they love, but a loved land has little use in time of war for the mere readiness of her sons. In peace they may decay and still be classified as men, but when the cannon roars it is not readiness, but fitness, that makes a man.


Next: Two: Two Kinds of Food -- The Constructive -- The Destructive

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