out of sight. We should parade before our mind's eye the inmates of
the lunatic, idiot, and pauper asylums, the prisoners, the patients
in hospitals, the sufferers at home, the crippled, and the
congenitally blind, and that large class of more or less wealthy
persons who flee to the sunnier coasts of England, or expatriate
themselves for the chance of life. There can hardly be a sadder
sight than the crowd of delicate English men and women with narrow
chests and weak chins, scrofulous, and otherwise gravely affected,
who are to be found in some of these places. Even this does not tell
the whole of the story; if there were a conscription in England, we
should find, as in other countries, that a large fraction of the men
who earn their living by sedentary occupations are unfit for
military service. Our human civilised stock is far more weakly
through congenital imperfection than that of any other species of
animals, whether wild or domestic.

It is, however, by no means the most shapely or the biggest
personages who endure hardship the best. Some very shabby-looking
men have extraordinary stamina. Sickly-looking and puny residents in
towns may have a more suitable constitution for the special
conditions of their lives, and may in some sense be better knit and
do more work and live longer than much haler men imported to the
same locality from elsewhere. A wheel and a barrel seem to have the
flimsiest possible constitutions; they consist of numerous separate
pieces all oddly shaped, which, when lying in a heap, look
hopelessly unfitted for union; but put them properly together,
compress them with a tire in the one case and with hoops in the other,
and a remarkably enduring organisation will result. A wheel with a
ton weight on the top of it in the waggons of South Africa will jolt
for thousands of miles over stony, roadless country without