Protokoll der ordentlichen GV 2012

notable study of the period, ‘One third of the nation, itappeared, was being starved by the other two-thirds’ 12 .Nor was it in moral or humanitarian terms alone that the highcost of poverty was perceived. As some had begun toappreciate, the all but total exclusion of the poor from otherthan minimal education, vocational training or even physicalfitness was effectively a forfeiting by Britain of human capitalthat competitor nations such as Germany increasingly wereaccessing to greater effect.In the eighteen-eighties, the height of public school boys agedeleven to twelve was on average five inches greater than oftheir industrial school counterparts 13 . Two out of three of the12,000 volunteers for service against the Boers examined inManchester had to be rejected as unfit, and fewer than one inten was classified as fully fit. 14 Ten per cent of the young menexamined for compulsory service under the conspicuouslyrelaxed standards of 1917 were totally unfit for service, 41.5per cent had ‘marked disabilities’ and 22 per cent had ‘partialdisabilities’. In all, only marginally more than a third of thepotential conscripts were in sufficiently sound physicalcondition to be acceptable 15 . Prejudice to the national intereston so gross a scale could not but give rise to alarm, even inthose quarters where compassion for the poor was leastprevalent12Hynes S. 1968, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, Princeton University Press, p. 55.13Hobsbawm 1968 Op Cit, p. 137.14Charles R. 1993, ‘The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism’ in The Chesterton Review, Vol XIX No 4,November 1993, p. 537.15Hobsbawm 1968 Op Cit, p. 137.6