Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/297

Rh less of uniformity in all penal establishments, whatever difference there may be among them in their other arrangements, such as the very various kinds of discipline and occupation.

"The same hygienic disadvantages arising out of the manner of living among confined bodies of people, which we have just been considering, contribute not a little also to the prevalence of consumption, be it more or less, among the population living at large; and that holds good equally for the well-to-do classes and for the poor. Here, again, there is no mistaking the drawbacks in the mode of life that have come along with the progress of modern civilization. 'The prevalence of consumption among the families of our villagers and farmers,' says an American writer, 'can be shown, we believe, to have kept step with the deviation of these families from their former frugal, active, and industrious manner of life, and their adoption of the absurd practices which characterize the mode of our fashionable classes in the larger cities.' Once more, I think the stress should be laid on spending the time amidst bad ventilation indoors, in living-rooms, but more particularly in bedrooms. In the latter the human being spends nearly half of his existence; and the rooms assigned as bedrooms by the better classes are too often chosen, not on considerations of health, but out of a desire to have the greatest amount of comfort in the public rooms of the house.

"But the dark side of civilization nowhere shows its influence for spreading consumption more decidedly than in those disastrous outbreaks of the disease among peoples who were wont to live perfectly free from all restraint and conventionality, but have now come into contact with Europeans, and have adopted European manners and vices. Of that we have sad examples in the ravages of consumption among certain tribes of North American Indians, among the natives of several groups of islands in the Pacific, among the Maoris of New Zealand, and in Algiers."—Hirsch, vol. iii. pp. 222–5.

"The same circumstances serve to account for the