inevitable result--physical and mental weakness and
inefficiency.

Important as are the factors of proper housing and sanitary
and hygienic conditions--matters which have occupied an
ever-increasing amount of attention on the part of public
officials as well as philanthropists in recent years--it is
now generally confessed by science that, important as they
are in themselves, they are relatively unimportant in the
early years of child life.

"Sanitary conditions do not make any real difference at
all," was the testimony of Dr. Vincent before the British
Departmental Committee. "It is food, and food alone." That
the evils of underfeeding are intensified when there is a
unhygienic environment is true, but it is equally true that
defect in the diet is the prime and essential cause of the
excessive death-rate among the children of the poor, and of
those infantile diseases and ailments which make for
defective adults, moral, mental, or physical, should they
survive.

DR. W.S. RAINSFORD A FORCEFUL FIGURE.

Fearless Utterances of the Rector of a
Famous Institutional Church in
New York.

Militant Christianity has for many years had no more energetic champion
than the Rev. Dr. William S. Rainsford, rector of St. George's Church, New
York City. When he took charge of the church in 1883, as a young man
thirty two-years of age, its congregation had greatly fallen off. In
twenty-two years of untiring work he built up the parish until it
contained more than seven thousand members, included in a varied system of
parochial activities.

Dr. Rainsford, who has resigned his charge owing to ill-health, used to be
a man of great physical vigor, a fact which emphasizes this suggestion of
the New York _Sun's_:

The physical exhaustion which sent Dr. Rainsford abroad and
now compels his retirement from duties so arduous seems to
be a calamity afflicting clergymen more than other
professional men and men of affairs. Is this because the
emotional strain is so much greater in the case of a
clergyman?

Dr. Rainsford--who was born in Ireland and educated in England--was
fearless in his pulpit utterances. In one sermon he said:

It is vain to cry out against a thing that a vast proportion
of mankind believes is not wrong. You can't make an Irishman
believe it is wrong to have beer with his dinner; you can't
make