Page:Medicine and the church.djvu/124

 taking active and useful parts as citizens far exceeds our previous conceptions as to the extent of the degeneration in our midst.

It is well-nigh impossible to obtain a complete census of the physical and mental states of the people. Statistics furnish us with so many fallacies that for present purposes I prefer to omit them, and deal only with broad issues which seem to have direct bearings upon the mental health of the community.

It is now an accepted fact that civilisation, with its tendencies towards the aggregation of individuals into dense communities, favours the occurrence in those communities of over-*crowding, pauperism, crime, and degeneration. For those designed by habit and heredity to rural life, migration to cities where the struggle for life is continued under totally different circumstances is disastrous, and for them the step from country to town is but one of the commonest of all the steps towards mental and physical deterioration, the accidents of civilisation finding in them merely the readiest victims.

The necessity of this migration, as determined by the state of agriculture, makes it none the less an evil, and it is a symptom in the evolution of an essentially agricultural race which is fraught with extreme danger to