Now, I would like to ask the members of this committee if they want this same thing in their homes; if they want the doctor to come in and say, bring out your wife and daughters, I am going to examine them, while the old white-haired physician whom you have had for years and have trusted has to stand powerlessly by or say, "my beat is across the river, and I can not serve you"? Mr. Chairman, I am just as sure as I am standing here to-night that before six months have gone by, if there is a special session of Congress called, that there will be a medical health bill introduced, of which this bill is the precursor. Stop it right now. The best place to cut off the snake's tail is right close behind his ears. This bill prescribes compulsory physical examinations and compulsory remedial measures.

These are objectionable because they needlessly terrify the parents. I have a friend who has a daughter who has just arrived at the age when she perhaps ought not to be examined, who was obliged to go to the school physician, a man, and say, "If you lay one finger on my daughter in physical examination I will thrash you so you will not examine anybody else for six months." The doctor said, "You are quite strenuous in your statements." He said, “I am strenuous, Doctor, for your own good. I want to spare you from suffering, and I mean exactly what I say."

Now, Mr. Chairman, why are we offering anything that will make it necessary for any self-respecting father to go to such an extreme as that? Not so long ago, mobs of frightened mothers howled around school buildings on the west side in New York City, and in one instance struck one of the teachers. Why? Because they had been told about compulsory medication, and thought that the children were going to be operated upon. There came into my own building a few days ago the mother of a boy so deaf that he was becoming mute and I had arranged to have him instructed in lip reading. I had the hardest time to persuade that mother that it was not operation. Time after time the interpreter, her oldest daughter, said, "We do not want the boy operated on." I said, "This is America; we do not teach people with a knife; we teach them. Can you understand the difference between teaching and operation?" It was a long time before I could allay that terror.

I wish to file as a part of my argument selections from two New York papers, the New York Herald and the Standard Union, discussing this fear that the board of education in New York State was prescribing that boys were to be stripped to the waist and examined, a practice, which I am glad to say, has been abandoned. The CHAIRMAN. If there is no objection, that may be included in your statement.

(The articles referred to are as follows:)

[From Brooklyn (N. Y.) Standard Union, Aug. 24, 1915.]

THEY WANT TO STRIP THE CHILDREN.

A certain type of city official is accustomed to regard poor people as so much live stock, to be herded and inspected as he sees fit. This type is now evidently in control of the department of health, which has made a law giving it the right to order all children to be stripped naked and looked at by medical employees of that department before being allowed to go to school.

The department of health is an executive body, holding office by appointment, but there has been granted to it the actual power to make laws and sum

mary power to enforce laws, being in its own little self legislature, judge, jury, and executioner; and this body of officeholders not only exercises these powers. but has lately got so it claims the right to say what powers it shall exercise. Hence the law of the naked children.

But when this collection of bureaucratic potentates attempts to put its childstripping ukase into effect there can be no doubt there will be a race to see which parents will be the first hundred to go to the courts for restraining orders. Thank Heaven, this country has not yet settled down to acquiescence in an invisible government by nobody knows whom, attempting to limit the right of all children to receive instruction in the public schools the taxpayers support, and trying to make an indecent invasion of the human right of privacy. This proposal to strip children naked was heard of a few years ago, from some man who called himself an "anthropologist," and wanted the right to go around measuring and inspecting everybody. It is now taken up by the New York Department of Health, with the naive allegation that ever so many parents don't know there is anything the matter with their children till they get sick.

The provision in the law these bureaucrats made for their own purpose which requires unclothing the children for inspection is one that calls for a test for "orthopedic defects." Orthopedic defects means bowlegs, knock-knees, flat foot, spinal curvature, shoulder blades sticking out, round shoulders, and things like that. No "othopedic defects" have the slightest relation to public health or to contagion. No doctor, not even a board of health doctor, has the slightest right to go around insisting on examining people, whether children or old men and women, for the sake of finding out whether they have what would be called in the case of children "orthopedic defects." It makes absolutely no difference to the public or the board of health or the board of education or anybody else except the parents whether children have orthopedic defects or not, and if the parents don't care it is nobody else's business.

The board of health, by way of enforcing the class distinction between rich and poor, so dear to the hearts of "experts" and bureaucrats, says the children will not have to be stripped and inspected in a schoolhouse if the parents will pay some doctor in private practice to do the inspecting.

According to this sociological and bureaucratic idea, the children are to be stopped at the door and the fortunate few who can produce a certificate from a doctor that they don't have hammer toes are to walk into the classroom, while all the poor children are to be herded off in some other room and stripped naked while an employee of the board of health examines them.

This is a little, in fact, a great deal too raw even for the long-suffering people of New York. If any doctors, in or out of the health department, are consumed with a burning curiosity to examine children, let them wait till the children are voluntarily brought to them for such examination as may be deemed necessary in the best judgment of their natural or legal guardians.

[From New York Herald of Sept. 11, 1915.]

Protest was frequent yesterday among parents and physicians against the rule adopted by the board of education which will force all newly enrolling pupils in the public schools to undergo a physical examination undressed.

Pupils entering school for the first time will be compelled to take a physical examination, stripping to the waist for the purpose. This has aroused wide criticism from parents and physicians, one of the most forceful among the latter being Dr. John P. Davin, of No. 117 West Seventy-sixth Street, who sees in the new order of Commissioner Goldwater "only an effort to make political jobs for physicians or medical inspectors." Dr. Davin believes that the half-stripping examination is no examination at all, and for that reason is of no earthly use either to the pupil or to the public schools in general.

"This enforcement of a physical examination of children stripped," he said, "is putting the city as a whole on the lowest possible footing that might be desired in settlement districts. It is only a half examination, and of no practical value. This whole thing is only one more illustration of the extension of officialdom to afford positions for more officeholders and greater expenditures.

CALLS STANDARD LOWER.

"The complete output of our schools to-day is of a lower standard than it ever has been, and this examination is only an effort to distract attention from the real cause by blaming the physical condition of the children for it. Parents rightly object to it, because it is only half an examination and deals with only a very small percentage of the children in the schools.

"The impression has been spread that this examination, with the child stripped to the waistline, meets the requirements of the best medical authorities for a thorough physical examination, which they are attributed as saying is seriously impaired when the child is fully dressed. The veriest tyro in medicine knows that the proposed examination is only a half measure in this respect, and one that merely is intended as the entering wedge to the 'thorough' physical examination that will be ultimately demanded if this project is carried out. This is favored by the superintendent of the Bureau of Welfare of School Children of the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor and by the secretary of the New York State Medical Inspectors' Association.

"The superintendent of public schools in this city some time ago made a request for the establishment of a medical bureau in connection with the schools which should be clothed with authority not only to examine for physical defects but for following up each case in order to persuade when possibleto coerce when necessary-the parents of the afflicted children to place them in a proper physical condition for attending school. Whether because it was shown at that time that in this recommendation the schoolmaster was demanding of his pupils as an alleged measure for increasing their capacity for learning a privilege that the physician could not conscientiously exact in matters of life and death, or on account of the fatalities resulting from taking children en masse to the clinics for the removal of tonsils and adenoids, at that time the bete noir of the educator, this recommendation failed of enactment.

ASSAILS PRESENT TENDENCIES.

"Along with our enormously increasing outlay for public education there has been a steady deterioration in the character and quality of the finished product of our schools. With this has gone an ever increasing physical supervision of the bodies of the pupils such as never was intended in the foundation of these schools. The more physical imperfections that can be tabulated against the incoming child the more justification can be urged for their lack of mental equipment at their graduation. Medical inspection in the schools was intended primarily to safeguard against infection and contagion. Now it is being used to divert and distract attention from the mental deficiencies and unmoral tendencies resulting from our present system of public education.,

The going to school of a child for the first time is always a thing of terror. There is no sense in making his first day worse in such a needless way as this stripped examination."

Edward F. Brown, superintendent of the Bureau of Welfare of School Children of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, sent out a circular yesterday suggesting that parents should accompany their children to school when the examination takes place.

"When the parent accompanies the child," says Mr. Brown, “parents and physician can confer on the child's general condition, courses of treatment can be outlined, the parents get a clearer idea of the system of medical inspection, and, in general, the examination is far more likely to be thorough and conclusive.

"Furthermore, should any parent still doubt the desirability of the stripped examination such doubt would disappear when the parent is a witness of the examination. If there are parents who do not want the school physician to make the examination it can be done by the family physician.”

Mr. DAVISON. This bill gives authority to persons not in the school system who do not realize the necessity of working in harness. On one occasion one of these people came into my building and attempted to lay down the law. I had to speak sternly so she would know her place. The school is not a dark room, and the boys are

not insensate materials. There must be a head to the school and that head must be respected. If I might cite an actual way in which this law will work detrimentally, it is well illustrated by a lunch room which was inaugurated in my own building by some wellintentioned person. A caterer whom we put in charge was responsible to a committee, but it did not work harmoniously. The venture, much as we wanted it to succeed, did not succeed and to-day we have no lunch room to feed those children, much as we would like to feed them.

Those are some of the specific objections we have to the bill. Further, the enactment of the bill will be an obstacle to the SmithTowner bill, and to the bill for a Department of Education with a Secretary in the President's Cabinet, recommended by the National Educational Association to be a part of the law of the land. I believe that we should have it. The tendency of the board of education in small towns is to legislate details. I was in Seattle, at the University of Washington, which received an appropriation of about a million dollars from the State in 1895. Their governing board got together and enacted every kind of legislation, filling places, doing everything they could to regulate that institution. After they had done all that they hired a president and when the president came out and saw that everything was already done and tied up in that way he threw down his pencil in disgust and said, you will have to get somebody else to fool his time around here. I am not the man.

I might cite instances galore of that kind, but I will not take your time, but Mr. Chairman, I ask for the Smith-Towner bill, because at the present time the Congress of the United States appropriates four times as much money per capita for hogs and sheep and horses and mules through the Bureau of Animal Industry as it does for the children of this nation through the Bureau of Education. Mr. Chairman, we want a place in the sun. We do not want this little bill that will obstruct the bigger things. We want a great university with its president the Secretary of Education. We want a competent man who can survey the whole field, who will make recommendations to your honorable body that will fit in everywhere, all over the country, and give us the very best that there is. Mr. Chairman. we appreciate what you are doing; we appreciate you good will, but we want something so much better that this will be a mere obstacle in the way of the things we are asking.

Mr. DONOVAN. Before you came in, it was announced that the Smith-Towner bill would not be discussed or anything pertaining to it.

Mr. DAVISON. I am sorry.

Mr. Donovan. I do not object. I am glad you brought it up. Are you aware that in the Smith-Towner bill there is an appropriation of $20.000.000 to be administered by the Secretary of Education, if appointed, for health and sanitation?

Mr. DAVISON. I do not object from the standpoint of the bill.
Mr. DONOVAN. Are you aware?

Mr. DAVISON. I have read it.

Mr. DONOVAN. Are you one of the board of education of the city of New York?

Mr. DAVISON. Yes, sir.

Mr. DONOVAN. What is the appropriation of the city of New York for public schools now; do you know?

Mr. DAVISON. They estimated it $77,000,000. They are $27,000,000 short at the present time.

Mr. DONOVAN. Do you know what the State of New York appropriates for its education?

Mr. DAVISON. It was stated last spring that $2,000,000 was appropriated for this bill. Aside from that I can not tell you.

Mr. DONOVAN. Under what bill?

Mr. DAVISON. For physical education, the Welch law.

Mr. DONOVAN. Do you know what is the minimum salary now for women teachers in New York?

Mr. DAVISON. Something over $1,200.

Mr. DONOVAN. That is all.

Mr. C. P. SMITH. The next speaker is Henry Deutsch, of Minneapolis, also a representative of the Christian Scientists, who has extensive experience with schools by reason of being on the Minneapolis school board for a long time.

STATEMENT OF MR. HENRY DEUTSCH, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.

The CHAIRMAN. State your name, address and whom you represent. Mr. DEUTSCH. Henry Deutsch, 806 Plymouth Building, Minneapolis, Minn. Mr. Chairman, I am a practicing lawyer by profession, and appear here by request of the Christian Science board of directors. In spite of my name, I was born and raised in the State of Minnesota and have been distinctly against and anti to anything that is made in Germany, which is one of the arguments that I shall advance a little later with reference to this bill.

I want to say at the outset, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, that I assume that our function here this evening is not in the nature of a debate or as might be indicated as opponents of anything, but for the purpose of coming here and discussing with you gentlemen or reasoning with you gentlemen with reference to this bill, and seeing if the information we have to offer may not in some way assist you in arriving at the conclusion as to whether or not this bill ought to be passed.

The CHAIRMAN. Let the chairman make the observation that that is why you are invited here and we are trying to protect you from anything that does not appertain to this particular measure.

Mr. DEUTSCH. I have no objection to answering any questions, even though a lawyer is supposed to make a very poor witness, and I am willing to give you from the fund of experience and information that I have anything that I can for the assistance of the committee. I have been asked to come here largely, I think, because of the fact that I did for six years, up to two years ago, serve on the board of education of the city of Minneapolis under rather peculiar circumstances-because I was a Christian Scientist-and even though I did not seek the position I was opposed both at the primaries and the final election by a combination of all of the physicians of the United States and by the women's clubs and other organizations who felt that I was going on the board for the purpose of destroying their pet measure of medical inspection, which had been introduced some two years before. I told them at the time that such was