534 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



health officers sniff through his dwelling and order its sanitary- 

 conditions; public overseers of buildings supervise its construc- 

 tion, and are required to serve notice on him when it is likely 

 to tumble down and hurt him ; the police protect his person and 

 his property, and the courts settle his disputes ; he is examined, 

 vaccinated, and protected from contagious diseases at public ex- 

 pense ; the overseers of the poor help him in unexpected exigen- 

 cies ; public baths are provided for his use, and public soup 

 houses are opened for him in time of general depression ; tem- 

 perance societies try to help him control his appetite ; salvation 

 armies endeavor to restrain his vices and improve his habits; 

 trades imions tell him when he may and may not work, what 

 work he may do and who he may work with, how much he may 

 do in one day when he does work, within how many hours of 

 that day he will be permitted to do it, and who he may or may 

 not work for, and the least price he will be permitted to receive 

 for his labor ; the churches all assist him in his spiritual and re- 

 ligious life, and the largest and oldest of them all will engage, 

 for a small weekly pittance and a few formal observances on his 

 part, to safely deliver in paradise at last what little soul a man 

 may have left after such a life as this. Thus all the complex 

 cerebral and convolutional development in his case, which it has 

 taken perhaps some hundreds of centuries to build up, is ren- 

 dered comparatively superfluous and, to the same extent like all 

 unexercised and useless organs or parts of organs positively detri- 

 mental and so to be modified or got rid of, and all brought about 

 by these two great changes, we brag of (and with good reason 

 from other points of view), both of which changes have taken 

 place within the last two centuries, chiefly within the last hun- 

 dred years, and the most important features of each within our 

 own lifetime. 



It is possible, of course, that some unforeseen change may 

 occur, and it may bring with it some new and unexpected field 

 for the exercise of his former mental activity, but at present it is 

 neither apparent nor probable. Thus the routine laborers, con- 

 stituting a large proportion of the inhabitants in many civilized 

 countries, most of whom have, or recently had, suflicient cerebral 

 capacity for great mental activity, are left with little more need 

 of, or exercise for a complex organ of thought in the performance 

 of their actual work than a caged squirrel has in rotating his 

 wheel, and outside of their actual work society in one form or 

 another has taken almost complete charge of them and of all 

 which formerly interested them. It is certain that with this 

 continuing condition despite all social and educational efforts to 

 the contrary the routine laborer must fall back through atro- 

 phy and degeneration to some plane where the equilibrium be- 



