it was medicine which passed in review one by one all those
individual cases which proclaim this legal fact: children have no
civil rights. Medicine now entered into another sphere where the
victims were not "cases," but the generality, the child-population in
its entirety; and now it is the law itself which imposes duties upon
them, and condemns them _en masse_ to labor for many years in a
manner which entails physical torture. If a branch of legal medicine
has arisen in connection with criminals, how is it that none should
ever have arisen in connection with the innocent?

* * * * *

=Science has not fulfilled its mission in its dealings with
children=.--Medicine has confined itself to the treatment of diseases
artificially produced. It has diagnosed a cause of disease and left
this cause undisturbed, content merely to alleviate the resultant
evils befalling a multitude of victims. It has not taken up the
attitude proper to its great and dignified role of "protector" of
life; it has merely come forward, like the Red Cross Service during
war, to heal the wounded and alleviate the condition of the suffering;
it has not considered that the authority it enjoys as the guardian of
health would enable it to utter the supreme cry of peace, putting an
end to a war so dangerous, unjust, and inhuman.

As, in its struggle against microbes, it was the standard-bearer in
the most glorious of victories over death, so, fighting directly
against the causes of the impoverishment of generations, it might have
aspired to bear the banner of protector of posterity. Instead of this,
it confined itself to the elaboration of a branch of study that mimics
science: school hygiene; thus making itself the accomplice of a social
wrong.

Let us glance into a recent treatise of school hygiene, which merely
sums up the ideas and the work of the world at large:

"We will briefly indicate the conditions favorable to the
development of spinal curvature. The age when the malady
usually appears is that of second infancy, hence its name of
spinal curvature of the adolescent; spinal curvature caused
by rickets, which appears in early childhood, is rarer, and
is of less direct interest to us here. The commonest cause,
and that on which our attention should be primarily
concentrated, is the vicious attitude adopted by the majority
of our pupils during their school work; this cause is so
universal