is the young, healthy, vigorous blood of the country which is exposed to these unhealthy conditions.  A pure Londoner of the third generation, that is, one whose grandparents as well as his parents were born in London, is very seldom found.  It is certain that nearly all the most effective vital energy given out in London work, physical and intellectual alike, belongs to men whose fathers were country bred, if they were not country born themselves.  In kinds of work where pure physical vigour play an important part, this is most strikingly apparent.  The following statistics bearing on the London police force were obtained by Mr. Llewellyn Smith in 1888—­

London born.  Country born.  Total.

Metropolitan Police      2,716         10,908        13,624
City          "            194            698           892

Railway men, carriers, omnibus-drivers, corn and timber porters, and those in whose work physique tells most, are all largely drawn from the country.  Nor is the physical deterioration of city life to be merely measured by death-rates.  Many town influences, which do not appreciably affect mortality, distinctly lower the vitality, which must be taken as the physical measure of the value of life.  The denizens of city slums not only die twice as fast as their country cousins, but their health and vigour is less during the time they live.

A fair consideration of these facts discloses something much more important than a mere change in social and industrial conditions.  Linked with this change we see a deterioration of the physique of the race as a distinct factor in the problem of city poverty.  This is no vague speculation, but a strongly-supported hypothesis, which deserves most serious attention.  Dr. Ogle, who has done much work in elucidation of this point, sums up in the following striking language—­

“The combined effect of this constantly higher mortality in the towns, and of the constant immigration into it of the pick of the rural population, must clearly be a gradual deterioration of the whole, inasmuch as the more energetic and vigorous members of the community are consumed more rapidly than the rest of the population.  The system is one which leads to the survival of the unfittest.”

Thus the city figures as a mighty vampire, continually sucking the strongest blood of the country to keep up the abnormal supply of energy it has to give out in the excitement of a too fast and unwholesome life.  Whether the science of the future may not supply some decentralizing agency, which shall reverse the centralizing force of modern industry, is not a wholly frivolous speculation to suggest.  Some sanguine imaginations already foresee the time when those great natural forces, the economical use of which has compelled men and women to crowd into factories in great cities, may be distributable with such ease and cheapness over the whole surface of the land as no longer to require that close local relation which means overcrowding in work and in home life.  If science could do this it would confer upon humanity an advantage far less equivocal than that which belongs to the present reign of iron and steam.