It must be recollected that the characteristics of town life increase in intensity for good and for evil with every increase in the size of a town, and its suburbs.Fresh country air has to pass over many more sources of noisome vapour before it reaches the average Londoner than before it reaches the average inhabitant of a small town.The Londoner has generally to go far before he can reach the freedom and the restful sounds and sights of the country.London therefore with 4,500,000 inhabitants adds to the urban character of England's life far more than a hundred times as much as a town of 45,000 inhabitants.
10.For reasons of this kind Welton (Statistical Journal, 1897)makes the extreme proposal to omit all persons between 15 and 35years of age in comparing the rates of mortality in different towns.The mortality of females in London between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five is, chiefly for this reason, abnormally low.If however a town has a stationary population its vital statistics are more easily interpreted; and selecting Coventry as a typical town, Galton has calculated that the adult children of artisan townsfolk are little more than half as numerous as those of labouring people who live in healthy country districts.When a place is decaying, the young and strong and hearty drift away from it; leaving the old and the infirm behind them, and consequently the birth-rate is generally low.On the other hand, a centre of industry that is attracting population is likely to have a very high birth-rate, because it has more than its share of people in the full vigour of life.This is especially the case in the coal and iron towns, partly because they do not suffer, as the textile towns do, from a deficiency of males; and partly because miners as a class marry early.In some of them, though the death-rate is high, the excess of the birth-rate over it exceeds 20 per thousand of the population.The death rate is generally highest in towns of the second order, chiefly because their sanitary arrangements are not yet as good as those of the very largest towns.
Prof.Haycraft (Darwinism and Race Progress) argues in the opposite direction.He lays just stress on the dangers to the human race which would result from a diminution of those diseases, such as phthisis and scrofula, which attack chiefly people of weak constitution, and thus exercise a selective influence on the race, unless it were accompanied by corresponding improvements in other directions.But phthisis does not kill all its victims; there is some net gain in a diminution of its power of weakening them.
11.See an article entitled "Where to House the London Poor" by the present writer in the Contemporary Review, Feb.1884.
12.In the Southern States of America, manual work became disgraceful to the white man; so that, if unable to have slaves himself, he led a paltry degenerate life, and seldom married.
Again, on the Pacific Slope, there were at one time just grounds for fearing that all but highly skilled work would be left to the Chinese; and that the white men would live in an artificial way in which a family became a great expense.In this case Chinese lives would have been substituted for American, and the average quality of the human race would have been lowered.
13.The extent of the infant mortality that arises from preventable causes may be inferred from the facts that the percentage of deaths under one year of age to births is generally about a third as much again in urban as in rural districts; and yet in many urban districts which have a well-to-do population it is lower than the average for the whole country (Registrar General's Report for 1905, pp.xlii-xlv).A few years ago it was found that, while the annual death rate of children under five years of age was only about two per cent in the families of peers and was less than three per cent for the whole of the upper classes, it was between six and seven per cent for the whole of England.On the other hand Prof Leroy Beaulieu says that in France the parents of but one or two children are apt to indulge them, and be over-careful about them to the detriment of their boldness, enterprise and endurance.(See Statistical Journal, Vol.54, pp.378-9.)
