not only with the vigorous countenance, but with the bodily size of the mercantile men on ’Change.  But it must be remembered always, first, that these men are the very elite of their class; the cleverest men; the men capable of doing most work; and next, that they are, almost all of them, from the great merchant who has his villa out of town, and perhaps his moor in the Highlands, down to the sturdy young volunteer who serves in the haberdasher’s shop, country-bred men; and that the question is, not what they are like now, but what their children and grand-children, especially the fine young volunteer’s, will be like?  And a very serious question I hold that to be; and for this reason: 

War is, without doubt, the most hideous physical curse which fallen man inflicts upon himself; and for this simple reason, that it reverses the very laws of nature, and is more cruel even than pestilence.  For instead of issuing in the survival of the fittest, it issues in the survival of the less fit:  and therefore, if protracted, must deteriorate generations yet unborn.  And yet a peace such as we now enjoy, prosperous, civilised, humane, is fraught, though to a less degree, with the very same ill effect.

In the first place, tens of thousands—­Who knows it not?—­lead sedentary and unwholesome lives, stooping, asphyxiated, employing as small a fraction of their bodies as of their minds.  And all this in dwellings, workshops, what not?—­the influences, the very atmosphere of which tend not to health, but to unhealth, and to drunkenness as a solace under the feeling of unhealth and depression.  And that such a life must tell upon their offspring, and if their offspring grow up under similar circumstances, upon their offspring’s offspring, till a whole population may become permanently degraded, who does not know?  For who that walks through the by-streets of any great city does not see?  Moreover, and this is one of the most fearful problems with which modern civilisation has to deal—­we interfere with natural selection by our conscientious care of life, as surely as does war itself.  If war kills the most fit to live, we save alive those who—­looking at them from a merely physical point of view—­are most fit to die.  Everything which makes it more easy to live; every sanatory reform, prevention of pestilence, medical discovery, amelioration of climate, drainage of soil, improvement in dwelling-houses, workhouses, gaols; every reformatory school, every hospital, every cure of drunkenness, every influence, in short, which has—­so I am told—­increased the average length of life in these islands, by nearly one-third, since the first establishment of life insurances, one hundred and fifty years ago; every influence of this kind, I say, saves persons alive who would otherwise have died; and the great majority of these will be, even in surgical and zymotic cases, those of least resisting power; who are thus preserved to produce in time a still less powerful progeny.