Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/79

Rh the principle—penetrating and universal, because founded in the very laws of our being.

It will scarcely be denied that the most highly civilized races and nations are also, on the whole, the most distinguished for morality, and that the stage of progress of a people at any given period may be fairly estimated by the character of the moral code then prevailing. This is so well understood that illustration is unnecessary. It then follows that the development of morality is inseparable from the general progress. But the degree of civilization of a people at any given stage is determined by the nature of its environment—i.e., by the conditions under whose influence the nation has developed. It has been pointed out by a distinguished philosopher in literature and art, Professor Taine, that "the profound differences which exist between the German races on the one hand, and the Greeks and Latins on the other, have arisen, for the most part, from the differences between the countries in which they are settled"—for social conditions are determined primarily by organic or bodily conditions—these, in turn, depending on the physical environment. Thus, the general sources of organic life must be recognized as the sources also of morals; and the emotional, intellectual, and moral nature of man as an integrant part of his physical organism: being such, these higher qualities are necessarily modified by the conditions which influence and modify the physical organism.

A distinguished English sanitarian, Mr. Edwin Chadwick, has said that he could build a city which would give any desired death-rate from fifty or any number higher than fifty, to five or perhaps even less than five in a thousand, annually; and the President of the Health Department of the British Social Science Association, at the annual meeting in 1875, expressed his unqualified confidence in the feasibility of Mr. Chadwick's proposition. This means nothing less than that the death-rate, within these wide limits, from five or less to fifty or more per thousand annually, depends on the degree of attention paid to certain public sanitary regulations.

Side by side with this proposition, I venture (and with a degree of confidence not less than that of Mr. Chadwick) to place another proposition far more radical than his, viz., that a city might be so built, and the municipality so administered, as to secure any desired degree of morality within certain limits. That these limits can not, at present, be as exactly defined as in the case of the death-rate, results from the lack of systematic study of the subject of morals, and the consequent want of complete statistics in this department of sociology. The nature of the limits may, however, be designated; and I beg to illustrate this point by reference to the principles of animal development, of which it has been said, by Professor Du Bois-Reymond, that "the laws of organic structure must account for whatever, in organisms, is either useless or actually disadvantageous"—natural selection