THE MORAL ASB SOCIAL ASPECTS OF HEALTH. 



145 



The rest of Lancashire and the West Riding of 

 Yorkshire has increased in the same way. 



Why and how is this ? Every one is ready 

 with the answer. It is the steam-engine — the 

 steam-engine and all the other engines which grew 

 up around it, some before and some after : the 

 spinning-jenny, Arkwright's rollers, Crompton's 

 mule, Cartwright's power loom, Brindley's ca- 

 nals, the iron-puddling machinery, dye-works, tel- 

 egraphs, and all the other countless applications 

 of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. 



All this was in the air, was germinating long 

 before ; the brains of Descartes, Galileo, Bacon, 

 and Newton, the brains even of Archimedes and 

 the Greek geometers, contained the germs of it. 

 The thing itself, the couquest of Nature by man, 

 was normal, was predestined, is still in great part 

 to come. But our question still is, " Why did it 

 come about in England with such terrific and ab- 

 normal rapidity ? " There was science in France 

 as well as in England. There is wealth at this 

 moment in France, after payment of her milliards, 

 as well as in England. But France is not devas- 

 tated by the hail-storm of hideous towns that has 

 visited this country. When you go from Charing 

 Cross to Paris, the two ends of the journey are 

 not alike. I have looked in Paris for a Stratford 

 or a Lambeth, but I have never found it. Misery 

 enough ; but not the same wide diffusion of un- 

 organized meanness, shabbiness, and squalor. 

 There must be a reason for this. 



And, again, I go back to the second of my 

 three great events of English history — I mean 

 the Puritan Revolution — and ask myself, " How 

 would it have been if that revolution had not 

 come to so violent and abortive a close ? " Put 

 prejudice aside, and realize for a moment, by the 

 aid of Milton, Bunyan, and Thomas Carlyle, what 

 the government of Cromwell and his Ironsides 

 meant. Think that England was really for a 

 series of years governed by a set of plain, hard- 

 headed men of business, to whom the Christian 

 religion was the most intense reality, a thing to 

 put into every-day working practice in the man- 

 agement of life, public as well as private. And 

 is it not probable, or rather certain, that if their 

 influence could have been maintained, in however 

 modified a way, the industrial development of 

 England would have been widely different ; that 

 while there would have been no Buddhist or 

 monastic indifference to material progress, yet 

 that politics (that is to say industry, which is 

 modern politics) would have been subordinated 

 to morality, to a degree of which the French Con- 

 vention alone, perhaps, in subsequent history has 



46 



given the world some imperfect glimpse ? You 

 will say that 1688 followed thirty years after 

 Cromwell's death, and that the good side of Pu- 

 ritanism was preserved, its extravagances sifted 

 away. I reply that the men were gone. England 

 had driven them out. The torch of republican 

 progress was in French hands. The most strenu- 

 ous types of manhood since the best days of the 

 Roman commonwealth had been chased beyond 

 seas — to Holland, to Geneva, and finally across 

 the Atlantic, where they were not heard of for a 

 hundred years, and then were heard somewhat 

 too loudly. 



I am not indulging in any spirit of paradox, 

 nor in any feeling of detraction of our own mod- 

 ern time. I recognize the renewal in our own 

 immediate generation of a nobler spirit of public 

 morality, underneath all outward discouragement. 

 Our political economy, for instance, imperfect 

 though it be, is widely different from the base 

 doctrines taught publicly thirty or forty years 

 ago; -and many other signs there are of the same 

 kind. But the eighteenth century in England 

 seems to me a time when, owing to the banish- 

 ment or suppression of her Doblest and bravest 

 men, public morality was dormant or dead ; when 

 the greatest statesman, with the applause of his 

 fellow-citizens (you may read it on Chatham's 

 pedestal in the Guildhall now), deliberately waged 

 war for the sake of- commerce ; when all harmo- 

 nious proportion between the aspects of man's 

 many-sided life was lost ; when all the sentences 

 of the old prayer were forgotten, except that 

 which asks for daily bread ; when all the scien- 

 tific energy of the nation was concentrated in the 

 alchemistic search for gold, until at last the un- 

 couth Genius came at our bidding, streaming 

 down, with profuse irony, his inky gifts of crowd- 

 ed town and hideous, trailing suburb, and black- 

 ened fields, and devastating chimneys — has come 

 at our bidding, and as yet refuses to go. Like 

 the Athenians with their nether-gods, so we, eu- 

 phemistically trembling, decorate him with an 

 imposing title. We call him Beneficent Law of 

 Supply and Demand ; and put up what poor 

 earthworks of defense we may in the shape of 

 sanitary appliances, drainage-works, and pollu- 

 tion-of-river commissions. But most of us still 

 believe that his dominion will endure forever. 



So much for the first of the two modes in 

 which civilization affects health. It creates a 

 complicated set of circumstances, a complicated 

 social environment which may or may not be fa- 

 vorable .to health. This is the political side of 

 the subject. Now a few words — and they must 



