QUESTION OF PHYSICAL DEGENERATION 279 



gain health, or, possibly, may even be infected with disease. In 

 these cases we often speak vaguely of inheritance. But, to 

 speak more correctly, the mother is an external condition. And 

 the child has already begun to feel the powerful influence of the 

 environment on his individual life. For clearness of thought, 

 then, we must distinguish between race improvement and the 

 improvement of the environment for the individual at the very 

 earliest stage. Nevertheless, taking a practical view, it is clear 

 that a great deal may still be done for the nation by the better- 

 ing of the environment, and in particular by the bettering of the 

 health of mothers. There is still a very considerable fund of 

 potential strength in our poorer classes which remains to be thus 

 exploited. The conditions of life, especially in our big towns, 

 are hard, and by improving them we should confer upon those 

 classes who are degraded by squalor that superabundant vitality, 

 that easy superiority to environment that is the antecedent con- 

 dition of energy and enterprise. In one way the environment is 

 easy enough. There are hospitals and medical attendance 

 everywhere to be had. But this does much to aggravate the 

 evil. If you surround people's lives with squalor and hunger, 

 and then, directly they are likely to succumb to the strain, put 

 them in a comparative paradise, a region of ease, comfort, cleanli- 

 ness, and good food, they may recover, but they will go back 

 to an unequal struggle with their normal circumstances. Mr 

 Francis Galton says that the poor classes of London look to him 

 like people for whom the conditions of life are too hard. The 

 explanation surely is that the conditions are not allowed to work 

 freely. Charity steps in and prolongs the misery. What is 

 wanted is an improvement in the normal conditions of life, better 

 housing, better food, and, more still, in the moral atmosphere, so 

 that there may not be, after recovery from illness, a return to 

 squalor and unwholesomeness. 



But though everyone must hope that the progress already 

 made towards rendering the lives of the poor in big towns more 

 healthy may continue, yet it is impossible to see in that a pre- 

 ventive of degeneration. We should be using up our capital 

 of race-vitality, not increasing it. We should be merely making 



