16 
development. The conditions under which labour was thus 
exploited were most insanitary, and the workers had to accept 
them with the accompanying hardships because they had no 
alternative. In 1825, the abolition of the Combination Laws 
removed one of the disadvantages under which workmen had 
laboured. ‘lhe iniquity of child labour was swept away, and 
during the last 50 years there had been a steady extension of 
State intervention in the regulation of factories, workshops, mines, 
&c.,—an advantage not only to the workers themselves, but also 
to the economic gain of the industries concerned. At the present 
time, with freedom of combination, reduced hours of labour, and 
improved sanitary conditions, the two parties of Capital and 
Labour were arranged separately under conditions far more 
nearly approaching equality than they had ever before been. 
Collectively these parties have an interest beyond the arrangement 
of their mutual shares in the produce of their industries, their 
activities being directed to obtaining from their environment the 
means of livelihood, but the modern history of the relations of 
capital and labour seemed to show that first one side and then the 
other had lost sight of each other’s well-being. Moreover, the 
means of existence of a community, outside a very short term of 
years, lie wholly in its future earnings, and since national energy 
at any time is a limited quantity, what was spent on internal 
struggle between those who ought to be co-operating reduced the 
quantity available for the struggle with nature and with competing 
earners, and even in millennial Utopia united humanity would have 
to continue its unending struggle with Nature, and would exist 
only by its success in turning her forces to its own service. Toa 
dispassionate observer, the well-being of every unit in the 
community was a matter of importance to every other unit ; work, 
the master of all, demanded men contented and fit, not half- 
starved and anxious, and required from them, during their hours 
of labour, keen and whole-hearted energy. Hence, in the conflict 
with environment, a high value must be attached to the develop- 
ment of the sense of the mutual economic importance of masters 
and men, and of their common rather than their several interests, 
and finally to the provision for those who fall for the time being 
in the industrial struggle. 
The problems of poverty and destitution, the lecturer 
maintained, had the utmost importance to public health, which 
had a close connection with prosperity, since the later furnished 
direct means of improving sanitary conditions. In_ existing 
conditions it was probable that the connection was far more 
directly due to the fact that improved health permitted the means 
of prosperity to be earned, and that contrariwise failure in health 
brought a large proportion of the population below the “ poverty 
line.” Ifthere be included in the definition of disease, moral and 
mental disorders, intemperance, vice, sloth and shiftlessness, the 
