266 PROBLEMS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 



have already dealt and which, therefore, requires but very brief 

 treatment now. 



No doubt if we compare the England of 1899 with trie 

 England of forty or fifty years back we cannot help recognising 

 that a strain is put upon the children of the poor that they were 

 free from then. They are kept at their lessons with much 

 greater regularity, and work in crowded and often ill-ventilated 

 rooms takes the place of play about the cottage door or on the 

 village green or of light work on a farm, perhaps no less healthy 

 than play. Moreover, our population is crowding into big towns 

 and their new homes are less healthy than the old. So far life 

 is harder. But the evils attendant on life in large towns and a 

 crude method of dealing with the problem of education are 

 likely to be very much mitigated, have, in fact, already been 

 mitigated to some extent. On the whole, we may say that life 

 is easier for the poor now than it has ever been before, unless 

 we travel in imagination back to ages of which it is impossible to 

 know much. Food and clothing have grown cheaper and wages 

 have gone up. Those are two great facts that cannot be counter- 

 balanced by anything that can be thrown into the opposite scale. 

 Moreover, there is no doubt that the British working man not 

 only works shorter hours than formerly but a fact that cannot 

 be mentioned on a political platform is much inclined, even 

 during this shorter time, to work at low pressure. No less true 

 is it that much less work than formerly falls upon the wives of 

 working men. Not so very long back they used commonly to 

 work in the fields. Now such a thing is very rarely seen. I 

 believe, if we correctly picture to ourselves the average or typical 

 life of Englishmen or Englishwomen of forty years ago and 

 compare it with the type or average of to-day, we shall find an 

 increase of comfort rather than of nerve strain. And as the 

 inventor multiplies more and more the effectiveness of a man's 

 labour, there will be a further increase of comfort. Life will be 

 softer, and as a consequence, unless some new factor comes in, 

 the race will be softer. 



insanity It is sometimes maintained that the alarming increase of insanity 

 that has taken place since 1871, the earliest year for which 



