IS 1923 THE COUNTRY HEALTHIER THAN THE TOWN upon the Constantine case we take this language at its face heavily And if value as Judge Allen took that of the Ohio constitution the Constantine case is itself destroyed notwithstanding the expostulations of Allen s colleagues it could again enjoy the potency as an adverse precedent which it ine that had Michigan and California This being so should at the same time blight the Kalamazoo and Sacramento cases in certain so far as their use as precedents in other It states is of Judge hard to imag is concerned THE COUNTRY HEALTHIER THAN THE TOWN IS There is a general impression that the the physical inferiority of the city is law demonstrated But did war statistics really selective service man And with respect to preventable diseases the country record show this I 291 inferior to the town s THE PHYSIQUE OF THE CITY MAN GOOD IN SPITE OF WAR STATISTICS BY RUFUS I his little with volume Germany Ay res t entitled The Colonel War Leonard P declares that the examination of rants under the selective service law showed the country boys to have made better records than those from tin cities One hundred thousand S TUCKER CROWDER BELIEVES COUNTRY BOY HAS ADVANTAGE General Crowder in his Second Report declares that a considerable physical advantage accrues to the boy reared in the country This conclusion is drawn from the following table country boys he says would furnish for the military service 4 790 more soldiers than would an equal number of city boys Colonel Ayres does not indicate the figures upon which his conclusions are based and the map which accompanies his book differs in many respects from the official reports and the provost But statements of the same general tenor have been commonly made by other writers hence it may be worth while to examine the statistical evidence upon which they Men examined in selected urban 100 000 regions Men 1 675 rejected Percentage of rejections Men examined 21 68 in selected rural 100 000 regions Men 16 894 rejected 16 89 Percentage rejected of the surgeon general marshal general seem to be based The urban regions selected for this computation were in the cities of New York Chicago Philadelphia CleveMilwaukee Seattle St Louis land Cincinnati and New Orleans regions were in all states the rural and were NATIONAL MUNICIPAL REVIEW 292 chosen from those districts which had less than 1 200 registrants 1 The report of the surgeon general states that defects were found only eighty seven one hundredths or seveneighths as commonly in rural as in urban districts 2 But in the same report it is explained that part of this excess of defects in cities is probably due to the more critical examination by the physicians of cities and to a more critical grade of examiners in the camps that drew from the more densely populated regions In this case the line between rural and urban districts was drawn by classifying 204 cities of 25 000 or more inhabitants as urban and all other districts as rural The actual number of persons examined was 1 336 906 in the urban and 2 427 195 in the rural districts but only about onehalf of these were re examined at the cantonments Consequently the dif ference in standards of examination between urban and rural examiners if was any difference was not there wholly corrected It would seem however that if the camp examinations were themselves uniform and unprejudiced the rural local examiners were more careful than those in the cities for among the 681 749 men from urban districts reexamined at the camps 283 937 or 41 65 per cent were found defective while among the 1 279 943 men from the rural districts re examined at the 1 In his First Report General Crowder presents a table based upon 79 000 physical examinations from ten different states This shows a ratio of amounting to 28 47 per cent in urban and 27 96 per cent in rural districts The urban districts in this instance are in cities of from 40 000 to 50 000 population with no large prorejections portion of alien immigrants the rural districts are counties in the same states containing no city of 30 000 or more 1 Defects Found in Drafted Men Washington 1920 p 348 camps only 456 367 June or 35 66 per cent were found defective separate analysis of At any the rate a results at Camps Devens Upton Dix and Grant shows that in each state contributing to these camps the proportion of men from rural districts found defective on re examination was less than the proportion among urban men The same true if rejected men only are considered instead of all men with physical is defects We that drafted tricts must conclude men from the therefore rural dis were in fact superior to drafted the cities in so far as phy men from sique is concerned URBAN MEN VOLUNTEERED EARLIER Does it then follow however that the urban population as a whole or even the urban male population of military age is inferior to that of the rural districts And if it does follow is this inferiority the result of the urban environment or of the methods of city life or of the racial structure of the As to the first city s population that it should be remembered query over 1 400 000 men volunteered during the war These we know came in greater proportion from the urban states than from the rural ones and very probably in greater numbers from the urban districts of each state That the urban states furnished more than their proportion of volunteers is shown by the list of statutory enlistment credits allowed to be deducted from the gross quota of the first draft also by the figures of voluntary enlistments to December 16 1917 published in the First Report of the provost marshal general and by the ratio of registrants in military service to the total number classified in all drafts as reported in the provost marshal general s Final Report Exceptions to the rule are Michigan Ohio and Connecticut urban which had fewer volunteers and Illinois states IS 1923 THE COUNTRY HEALTHIER THAN THE TOWN 293 several rural states which had more than the average proportion of volun factors 8 tary enlistments the country a well known fact moreover that the National Guard on account At any rate the physical inferiority of the urban to the rural population of the United States is by no means con It is of the location of its armories was mainly composed of urban men and it very likely that the easier access to recruiting stations caused city men to enlist in the army or the navy in greater numbers than men from the