Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/343

Rh As regards the physical improvement or degeneracy of the population, the report of the Anthropometric Committee at the Southport meeting says: "Few statistics are in existence which help to throw light on this subject. It is generally believed that the population in the manufacturing towns of the north of England is rapidly degenerating, but a comparison of the measurements of stature and weight given in the report of the Factory Commission, and the report to the Local Government Board of the employment of children and young persons in factories, 1873, show that this is not the case."

What we want is more extensive inquiries as to measurements of persons who have lived in large towns for two or three generations, and compare them with those who have lived in the surrounding country for some generations without admixture. Such an inquiry is surrounded by difficulties, but it alone would be conclusive. My contention is, that it is in the loss of physique, of muscular tonicity, vital capacity, and vital force that the degeneracy is to be found. Let the town-dweller of the same height and weight go to the Grasmere sports or the Braemar gathering and try conclusions in wrestling or games of prowess and endurance with the hill-side man, and the issue will not long hang in doubt; the town man has no "staying power," no "muscular contractile power," and he soon comes to grief. Probably no arrest in the downward tendency of constitutional power can take place until there is some amelioration in the conditions of life to which town-dwellers are subjected. Development and integrity of cell-structure, and the processes of vital organization, are next to impossible under such circumstances of life as those to which they are exposed. This question is a broad one, and involves many ramifications. If all the circumstances connected with the so-called "sweating system" brought out by "The Lancet" Commission can be sustained as facts, a terribly hideous and degrading state of things exists among those unfortunate creatures compelled by the irony of Fate to dwell and work in the slums of our great towns. Their life is little removed from the process of wallowing in dirt, and abiding in squalor and poverty of the most appalling description. They are surrounded by every circumstance of human existence calculated to debase the mind and destroy the body. Is it possible to conceive any state of life more conducive to loss of health and dwarfing of physical development? These poor creatures appear to have no qualifying or redeeming feature in their every-day routine of life. Breathing in their insanitary homes the reeking fumes of unhealthy surroundings, an atmosphere vitiated to the last degree of respiratory fitness, to which are added unwholesome food and consequent faulty assimilation the aggregation must inevitably result in depraved constitutional