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 sanitary
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 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