Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/108

98 movements toward social and religions reform are signs of individual initiative and individual force. The country which stamps out individuality will soon live in the mass alone.

XX. A French writer has claimed that the decay of religious spirit in France is connected with the growth of religious orders of which celibacy is a prominent feature. If religious men and women leave no descendants, their own spirit, at least, will fail of inheritance. A people careless of religion inherit this trait from equally careless ancestors.

XXI. Indiscriminate charity has been a fruitful cause of the survival of the unfit. To kill the strong and to feed the weak is to provide for a progeny of weakness. It is a French writer again, who says that "Charity creates the misery she tries to relieve; she can never relieve half the misery she creates."

There is to-day in Aosta, in Northern Italy, an asylum for the care and culture of idiots. The crétin and the goitre are assembled there, and the marriage of those who can not take care of themselves ensures the preservation of their strains of unfitness. By caring devotedly for those who in the stress of life could not live alone for a week and by caring for their children, generation after generation, the good people of Aosta have produced a new breed of men, who can not even feed themselves. These are incompetent through selection of degradation, while the 'man of the hoe' is primitively ineffective.

The growth of the goitre in the valleys of Savoy, Piedmont and Valais is itself in large part a matter of selection. The boy with the goitre is exempt from military service. He remains at home to become the father of the family. It is said that at one time the government of Savoy furnished the children of that region with lozenges of iodine, which were supposed to check the abnormal swelling or the thyroid gland, known as the goitre. This disease is a frequent cause of idiocy or cretinism, as well as its almost constant accompaniment. It is said the mothers gave the lozenges only to the girls, preferring that the boys should grow up to the goitre rather than to the army. The causes of goitre are obscure, perhaps depending on poor nutrition, or on mineral substances in the water. The disease itself is not hereditary so far as known, but susceptibility to it certainly is. By taking away for outside service those who are resistant, the heredity of tendency to goitrous swelling is fastened on those who remain.

Like these mothers in Savoy was a mother in Germany. Not long since, a friend of the writer, passing through a Franconian forest, found a young man lying senseless by the way. It was a young recruit for the army who had got into some trouble with his comrades. They had beaten him and left him lying with a broken head. Carried to his home, his mother fell on her knees and thanked God, for this injury had saved him from the army.