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20
LABOUR AND CHILDHOOD

boxes, 6 feet high, 3 feet deep, and the partitions, of varnished wood, are two or three inches clear from the floor. The bath-room floor has small red tiles, and the bottoms of the troughs are tiled. Coarse matting is laid down in the passages. … The girls wear a sleeveless gown of white and blue striped cotton." Here, as elsewhere, the testimony is that the bathing has resulted in a great improvement of the school atmosphere, in increase of zest for work and mental energy in the children, and a steady gain in self-respect, which must end in placing a great gulf between the past and the future of tens of thousands of citizens.

School bathing was begun thirty years ago in the schools of Mannheim. Since then it has spread all over Germany, and is now almost as much a part of the curriculum as are the three R's. It is not difficult to see some relation between it and the smallness of the percentage—not much more than 1 per cent—of neglected children in the Fatherland, only 1.8 per cent, while here, in England, in some districts the percentage is, not 1, but in some areas 50, 60, and 75 per cent of all the scholars. (Dr. Crowley, of Bradford, estimates that 35 per cent of school children are in an utterly neglected state—very verminous—and only 30 per cent very clean.) What a real saving