Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/550

534 health officers sniff through his dwelling and order its sanitary conditions; public overseers of buildings supervise its construction, and are required to serve notice on him when it is likely to tumble down and hurt him; the police protect his person and his property, and the courts settle his disputes; he is examined, vaccinated, and protected from contagious diseases at public expense; the overseers of the poor help him in unexpected exigencies; public baths are provided for his use, and public soup houses are opened for him in time of general depression; temperance societies try to help him control his appetite; salvation armies endeavor to restrain his vices and improve his habits; trades unions tell him when he may and may not work, what work he may do and who he may work with, how much he may do in one day when he does work, within how many hours of that day he will be permitted to do it, and who he may or may not work for, and the least price he will be permitted to receive for his labor; the churches all assist him in his spiritual and religious life, and the largest and oldest of them all will engage, for a small weekly pittance and a few formal observances on his part, to safely deliver in paradise at last what little soul a man may have left after such a life as this. Thus all the complex cerebral and convolutional development in his case, which it has taken perhaps some hundreds of centuries to build up, is rendered comparatively superfluous and, to the same extent like all unexercised and useless organs or parts of organs positively detrimental and so to be modified or got rid of, and all brought about by these two great changes, we brag of (and with good reason from other points of view), both of which changes have taken place within the last two centuries, chiefly within the last hundred years, and the most important features of each within our own lifetime.

It is possible, of course, that some unforeseen change may occur, and it may bring with it some new and unexpected field for the exercise of his former mental activity, but at present it is neither apparent nor probable. Thus the routine laborers, constituting a large proportion of the inhabitants in many civilized countries, most of whom have, or recently had, sufficient cerebral capacity for great mental activity, are left with little more need of, or exercise for a complex organ of thought in the performance of their actual work than a caged squirrel has in rotating his wheel, and outside of their actual work society in one form or another has taken almost complete charge of them and of all which formerly interested them. It is certain that with this continuing condition—despite all social and educational efforts to the contrary—the routine laborer must fall back through atrophy and degeneration to some plane where the equilibrium