Health and Education | Page 2

fresh demand for

human beings and a fresh supply of food for them. Britain, at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, was in an altogether new social
situation.
At the beginning of the great French war; and, indeed, ever since the
beginning of the war with Spain in 1739--often snubbed as the "war
about Jenkins's ear"--but which was, as I hold, one of the most just, as
it was one of the most popular, of all our wars; after, too, the once
famous "forty fine harvests" of the eighteenth century, the British
people, from the gentleman who led to the soldier or sailor who
followed, were one of the mightiest and most capable races which the
world has ever seen, comparable best to the old Roman, at his mightiest
and most capable period. That, at least, their works testify. They
created--as far as man can be said to create anything--the British
Empire. They won for us our colonies, our commerce, the mastery of
the seas of all the world. But at what a cost--
"Their bones are scattered far and wide, By mount, and stream, and
sea."
Year after year, till the final triumph of Waterloo, not battle only, but
worse destroyers than shot and shell--fatigue and disease--had been
carrying off our stoutest, ablest, healthiest young men, each of whom
represented, alas! a maiden left unmarried at home, or married, in
default, to a less able man. The strongest went to the war; each who fell
left a weaklier man to continue the race; while of those who did not fall,
too many returned with tainted and weakened constitutions, to injure, it
may be, generations yet unborn. The middle classes, being mostly
engaged in peaceful pursuits, suffered less of this decimation of their
finest young men; and to that fact I attribute much of their increasing
preponderance, social, political, and intellectual, to this very day. One
cannot walk the streets of any of our great commercial cities without
seeing plenty of men, young and middle-aged, whose whole bearing
and stature shows that the manly vigour of our middle class is anything
but exhausted. In Liverpool, especially, I have been much struck not
only with the vigorous countenance, but with the bodily size of the
mercantile men on 'Change. But it must be remembered always, first,

that these men are the very elite of their class; the cleverest men; the
men capable of doing most work; and next, that they are, almost all of
them, from the great merchant who has his villa out of town, and
perhaps his moor in the Highlands, down to the sturdy young volunteer
who serves in the haberdasher's shop, country-bred men; and that the
question is, not what they are like now, but what their children and
grand-children, especially the fine young volunteer's, will be like? And
a very serious question I hold that to be; and for this reason:
War is, without doubt, the most hideous physical curse which fallen
man inflicts upon himself; and for this simple reason, that it reverses
the very laws of nature, and is more cruel even than pestilence. For
instead of issuing in the survival of the fittest, it issues in the survival
of the less fit: and therefore, if protracted, must deteriorate generations
yet unborn. And yet a peace such as we now enjoy, prosperous,
civilised, humane, is fraught, though to a less degree, with the very
same ill effect.
In the first place, tens of thousands--Who knows it not?--lead sedentary
and unwholesome lives, stooping, asphyxiated, employing as small a
fraction of their bodies as of their minds. And all this in dwellings,
workshops, what not?--the influences, the very atmosphere of which
tend not to health, but to unhealth, and to drunkenness as a solace under
the feeling of unhealth and depression. And that such a life must tell
upon their offspring, and if their offspring grow up under similar
circumstances, upon their offspring's offspring, till a whole population
may become permanently degraded, who does not know? For who that
walks through the by-streets of any great city does not see? Moreover,
and this is one of the most fearful problems with which modern
civilisation has to deal--we interfere with natural selection by our
conscientious care of life, as surely as does war itself. If war kills the
most fit to live, we save alive those who--looking at them from a
merely physical point of view--are most fit to die. Everything which
makes it more easy to live; every sanatory reform, prevention of
pestilence, medical discovery, amelioration of climate, drainage of soil,
improvement in dwelling-houses, workhouses, gaols; every
reformatory school, every hospital, every cure of drunkenness, every

influence, in short, which has--so I am told--increased the average
length of life in these islands, by nearly one-third, since the first
establishment