BY THE SAME AUTHOR ELEMENTARY PHYSIOGRAPHY Treated Experimentally With 4 Maps and 243 Diagrams ADVANCED PHYSIOGRAPHY With 215 Illustrations LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. AND SOCIAL PROGRESS BY ALEXANDER MORGAN M.A., D.Sc., F.R.S.E. PRINCIPAL OF THE PROVINCIAL TRAINING COLLEGE, EDINBURGH LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 1916 All rights reserved. PREFACE THIS is the age of the Social question. At no previous time have the needs and problems of society been more keenly felt or more earnestly faced. Our social problems are spiritual and ethical as well as economic. In dealing with them two objects must always be kept in view: one is the improvement of the economic conditions of the people, and the other, and no less important, the improvement of personal character. Social workers have been slow to realise that prevention is better than cure, and that the child is the centre of the social problem and our strong hope of its ultimate solution. We have been devoting too much attention to adults and too little to the young. The words of an old writer contain much wisdom: Barren land should not be cultivated, nor even once ploughed'; or, as a modern writer even more pointedly puts it, 'Too much money is spent upon the diseased tree, not enough upon the growing twig.' Let us honestly face the fact that we cannot do much to modify the lives and characters of the adults of the community who have gone astray, but we can do a great deal to bring physical, mental, and moral health into the lives of the children, and to give scope to their infinite potentialities for the good of the nation. Think of the fifteen million children in the |