Health and Education | Page 3

of life insurances, one hundred and fifty years ago; every
influence of this kind, I say, saves persons alive who would otherwise
have died; and the great majority of these will be, even in surgical and
zymotic cases, those of least resisting power; who are thus preserved to
produce in time a still less powerful progeny.
Do I say that we ought not to save these people, if we can? God forbid.
The weakly, the diseased, whether infant or adult, is here on earth; a
British citizen; no more responsible for his own weakness than for his
own existence. Society, that is, in plain English, we and our ancestors,
are responsible for both; and we must fulfil the duty, and keep him in
life; and, if we can, heal, strengthen, develop him to the utmost; and
make the best of that which "fate and our own deservings" have given
us to deal with. I do not speak of higher motives still; motives which to
every minister of religion must be paramount and awful. I speak merely
of physical and social motives, such as appeal to the conscience of
every man--the instinct which bids every human-hearted man or
woman to save life, alleviate pain, like Him who causes His sun to
shine on the evil and on the good, and His rain to fall on the just and on
the unjust.
But it is palpable, that in so doing we must, year by year, preserve a
large percentage of weakly persons, who, marrying freely in their own
class, must produce weaklier children, and they weaklier children still.
Must, did I say? There are those who are of opinion--and I, after
watching and comparing the histories of many families, indeed, of
every one with whom I have come in contact for now five-and-thirty
years, in town and country, can only fear that their opinion is but too
well founded on fact--that in the great majority of cases, in all classes
whatsoever, the children are not equal to their parents, nor they, again,
to their grandparents of the beginning of the century; and that this
degrading process goes on most surely, and most rapidly, in our large
towns, and in proportion to the antiquity of those towns, and therefore
in proportion to the number of generations during which the degrading
influences have been at work.

This and cognate dangers have been felt more and more deeply, as the
years have rolled on, by students of human society. To ward them off,
theory after theory has been put on paper, especially in France, which
deserve high praise for their ingenuity, less for their morality, and, I
fear, still less for their common-sense. For the theorist in his closet is
certain to ignore, as inconvenient to the construction of his Utopia,
certain of those broad facts of human nature which every active parish
priest, medical man, or poor-law guardian has to face every day of his
life.
Society and British human nature are what they have become by the
indirect influences of long ages, and we can no more reconstruct the
one than we can change the other. We can no more mend men by
theories than we can by coercion--to which, by the by, almost all these
theorists look longingly as their final hope and mainstay. We must
teach men to mend their own matters, of their own reason, and their
own free-will. We must teach them that they are the arbiters of their
own destinies; and, to a fearfully great degree, of their children's
destinies after them. We must teach them not merely that they ought to
be free, but that they are free, whether they know it or not, for good and
for evil. And we must do that in this case, by teaching them sound
practical science; the science of physiology, as applied to health. So,
and so only, can we check--I do not say stop entirely--though I believe
even that to be ideally possible; but at least check the process of
degradation which I believe to be surely going on, not merely in these
islands, but in every civilised country in the world, in proportion to its
civilisation.
It is still a question whether science has fully discovered those laws of
hereditary health, the disregard of which causes so many marriages
disastrous to generations yet unborn. But much valuable light has been
thrown on this most mysterious and most important subject during the
last few years. That light--and I thank God for it--is widening and
deepening rapidly. And I doubt not that, in a generation or two more,
enough will be known to be thrown into the shape of practical and
proveable rules; and that, if not a public opinion, yet at least, what is
more useful far, a wide-spread private