Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/620

604 There are further ways in which this process necessarily works a like general effect, however far it is carried. For, as fast as more and more detrimental agencies are removed or mitigated, and as fast as there goes on an increasing survival and propagation of those having delicately-balanced constitutions, there arise new destructive agencies. Let the average vitality be diminished by more effectually guarding the weak against adverse conditions, and inevitably there come fresh diseases. A general constitution, previously able to bear without derangement certain variations in atmospheric conditions, and certain degrees of other unfavorable actions, if lowered in tone, will become subject to new kinds of perturbation, and new causes of death. In illustration I need but refer to the many diseases from which civilized races suffer, but which were not known to the uncivilized. Nor is it only by such new causes of death that the rate of mortality, when decreased in one direction, increases in another. The very precautions against death are themselves, in some measure, new causes of death. Every further appliance for meeting an evil, every additional expenditure of effort, every extra tax to meet the cost of supervision, becomes a fresh obstacle to living. For, always in a society where population is pressing on the means of subsistence, and where the efforts required to fulfil vital needs are so great that they here and there cause premature death, the powers of producers cannot be further strained by calling on them to support a new class of non-producers, without, in some cases, increasing the wear and tear to a fatal extent. And, in proportion as this policy is carried further—in proportion as the enfeeblement of constitution is made greater, the required precautions multiplied, and the cost of maintaining these precautions augmented—it must happen that the increasing physiological expenditure thrown on these enfeebled constitutions must make them succumb so much the earlier: the mortality evaded in one shape must come round in another.

The clearest conception of the state brought about will be gained, by supposing the society thus produced to consist of old people. Age differs from maturity and youth in being less able to withstand influences that tend to derange the functions, as well as less able to bear the efforts needed to get the food, clothing, and shelter, by which resistance to these influences may be carried on; and, where no aid is received from the younger, this decreased strength and increased liability to derangement by incident forces make the life of age difficult and wearisome. Those who, though young, have weak constitutions, are much in the same position: their liabilities to derangement are similarly multiplied, and, where they have to support themselves, they are similarly overtaxed by the effort, relatively great to them and made greater by the maintaining of precautions. A society of enfeebled people, then, must lead a life like that led by a society of people who had outlived the vigor of maturity, and yet had none to