Under-Nourished.

The last film, "Nutrition," with a commentary by Julian Huxley, was longest and perhaps the most Illuminating. Those with full bellies find it difficult to conceive that people may be in a state of semi-starvation, and it must therefore have come as a distinct shock to a number of members of the audience to find that in England to-day four and a half million people have only four shillings a week to spend on food, eighteen million have eight shillings, and a further nine million have only ten shillings.

The film dealt with the recent enquiry made in England as to the food consumed by the people. Exhaustive enquiries were made throughout the land to find out exactly what each class spent on food, and how it was spent. It was found that the food of the poorer classes was almost entirely lacking in the elements necessary to supply the body's fundamental deficiencies; that at least a quarter of the children in Britain were gravely undernourished; and that the future of the British race was seriously imperilled by under-nutrition.

The methods shown in the film and used to combat the evil are estimable, but pitiful. Children are given milk rations. A few schools give free health dinners to the children. Meals and instruction are given to a few expectant mothers. Just scratching the surface.

As Mr. Huxley said: "Some measure of economic change is, of course, necessary, before our children can be properly fed. As long as we live under a system where wages do not depend on what the worker produces, where the means of production are owned by a small class consisting of one tenth of the population, and where the profits of Industry are not used for the benefit of the community as a whole, our children will be undernourished. It is inevitable."

We saw two rats in this film. One a miserable little specimen, had been fed on the average working class diet. The other, fat and bloated, had been fed on a properly constituted diet. And the big fat rat was crawling all over the little miserable one.

—R.L.M.