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 encouraging them to make still greater efforts for themselves in the future.

During the same period we had seen great improvements in education and sanitation, the lengthening of human life, the total extinction of the plagues which used to scourge Europe periodically, the practical abolition of certain diseases such as typhus and small-pox; and the general attention to health and the mental improvement of all classes, though it still left very much to be desired, was making progress which was perhaps as rapid as could be expected, owing to the ignorance and conservatism which are the common lot and the pride of most of us.

It may be true that Capitalism has had very little to do directly with these improve-