QUESTION OF PHYSICAL DEGENERATION 245 



conscious of a certain vagueness, the compilers have lumped 

 consumption and cough together. The marked increase observ- 

 able may be very possibly due to the inaccuracy of the previous 

 bills. It is astonishing that in the year of the decapitation of the 

 king anyone should have found leisure and patience to count the 

 victims of a particular disease. Whatever inaccuracy or in- 

 completeness there may be, the broad fact remains that tubercular 

 disease in various forms has been dealing death in England for 

 centuries past. As to the proportion of the general death-rate 

 referable to it now, authorities differ. According to the 

 Registrar-General's report it was in 1896 rather less than one in 

 ten. 1 But Dr Malcolm Morris writes in the Fortnightly Review, 

 August 1898 : " At least one in every eleven persons in these 

 islands dies of consumption, and there are several other forms of 

 tubercular disease which, if not equally fatal, swell the total of 

 death." This does not give us any exact figure. Mr J. A. 

 Gibson, in the Nineteenth Century, January 1899, apparently 

 on the authority of Sir Thomas Grainger Stewart, says : 

 " Tuberculosis accounts for at least one-sixth of the total 

 death-rate." 



If the disease is still so deadly, it may be argued that, after 

 all, the race is not becoming superior to it through the working 

 of Natural Selection. To this the answer is, that the crowded 

 life in the big towns of the present day thousands of families 

 living in one-roomed tenements makes the conditions very 

 favourable for the germ. Consumption is now known to spread 

 by infection. What is inherited is not the disease, but the 

 weakness which pre-disposes towards it. The prevalence of the 

 disease is, therefore, easily accounted for by the circumstances of 

 modern English life. And if we wish to realise the progress 

 made by the race in power of resistance to it, we have only to 

 contrast with its limited activity in England the havoc it plays 

 among savages. Consumption, small-pox, and fire-water are 

 three things that civilisation generally brings with it. Against 

 the first of the three we have been fortified by a sweeping 

 process of elimination in past generations : against the two last 



1 See the Registrar-General's Report for 1896, p. Ix. 



