fancying that savages were peculiarly healthy, because those who
were seen were active and strong. The simple answer is, that the
strong alone survived, while the majority died from the severity
of the training. Savages do not increase in number; and our
ancestors increased but very slowly for many centuries. I am not
going to disgust my audience with statistics of disease: but
knowing something, as I happen to do, of the social state and of
the health of the Middle and Elizabethan Ages, I have no
hesitation in saying that the average of disease and death was far
greater then than it is now. Epidemics of many kinds, typhus,
ague, plague--all diseases which were caused more or less by bad
air--devastated this land and Europe in those days with a horrible
intensity, to which even the choleras of our times are mild. The
back streets, the hospitals, the gaols, the barracks, the camps--
every place in which any large number of persons congregated, were
so many nests of pestilence, engendered by uncleanliness, which
defiled alike the water which was drunk and the air which was
breathed; and as a single fact, of which the tables of insurance
companies assure us, the average of human life in England has
increased twenty-five per cent. since the reign of George I.,
owing simply to our more rational and cleanly habits of life.

But secondly, I said that when our ancestors got on well, they did
so because they got ventilation in spite of themselves. Luckily
for them, their houses were ill-built; their doors and windows
would not shut. They had lattice-windowed houses, too; to live in
one of which, as I can testify from long experience, is as
thoroughly ventilating as living in a lantern with the horn broken
out. It was because their houses were full of draughts, and still
more, in the early Middle Age, because they had no glass, and