furnish evidence of numerous cases in which the eyes have been
ruined through some slight defect becoming intensified through misuse.

In the second place, the examination for physical and mental defect
cannot in a large number of cases be left to the self-interest and
judgment of the individual parent, and unless undertaken by the public
authority will not be undertaken at all.

In the third place, if it is left to merely voluntary agencies, it is
imperfectly done, and in many cases recourse is had to the various
voluntary agencies when the trouble has become acute, and in some cases
impossible of remedy.

On these three grounds--of its necessity for the future public welfare,
that the self-interest of the parent often proves but a feeble motive
power, and that the voluntary agencies placed at the disposal of the
poor are unable systematically to undertake this work--we may maintain
that the duty may legitimately be laid upon the State.

But the further question as to how far it becomes the duty of the State
to undertake the provision of remedial measures either in the way of
supplying medical aid or in the provision in necessitous cases of
remedial measures, as _e.g._ spectacles in the case of defective
eyesight, is a question of much greater difficulty.

At present any positive help of this nature is the exception rather than
the rule, and is undertaken by agencies worked on the voluntary
principle, and the remedial measures adopted are limited to the
treatment of certain minor ailments. _E.g._, in Liverpool, Birmingham,
and other places, Queen's nurses regularly visit the schools, and
undertake either in school or at the homes of the children simple
curative treatment of minor surgical cases. But while it may be held
that the duty of the State is limited to the medical examination of
school children in order to discover the presence of physical and mental
defects, and that this being done, any further responsibility, whether
in the way either of providing or procuring remedies, falls upon the
individual parent, yet we have sufficient evidence to show that, in many
cases, either through the poverty or the apathy and indifference of the
parents, no steps are taken in the way of providing the necessary
remedies, and as a consequence we have growing up in our midst children
who in after-life will, through the lack of simple curative treatment
undertaken at the proper time, become more or less socially inefficient.