310 PROBLEMS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 



under five years of age, and more than 18,000, of infants 

 in their first year. Now, in the light of the facts revealed by 

 the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children it is 

 impossible to doubt that a very large portion of these deaths 

 were due to starvation, and the starvation must in many cases be 

 due to moral defects in the parents. Consider next the deaths of 

 those over five years of age put down under the same head, 

 11 debility, atrophy, inanition." There are only two hundred 

 and seventy-one. But does anyone suppose that this is anything 

 approaching to the annual total of deaths indirectly traceable 

 to starvation or insufficient food ? The fact is that insufficiency 

 of nourishment and filthy surroundings bring out tendencies to 

 disease that would otherwise remain latent. And thus thousands 

 of deaths caused by underfeeding are credited to various diseases. 

 But the underfeeding is due very often to want of character in 

 the parents or in the persons themselves. Those who are 

 thoroughly steady and dependable get work and are fairly well 

 fed a fact that makes philanthropy difficult. Hunger is often 

 not so much a cause of deficient morale as a symptom of it. It 

 is on the class that lives in squalor and on the verge of starva- 

 tion, that disease, and especially consumption, falls most merci- 

 lessly. So that we have a chain of causation. Defect of 

 character causes poverty : from proverty result squalor and 

 deficiency of food : disease is aggravated by squalor and hunger. 

 Thus many of the victims of disease are eliminated because they 

 or their parents have not the moral qualities which civilised life 

 requires. 



Alcohol Alcohol is a potent force that has much to do with the 

 development of race-character : as I have already shown it 

 promotes physical evolution. When drinking is the fashion, 

 a physical constitution strong enough to resist the ill effects 

 of a large amount of alcohol is for most of the male sex a 

 condition of survival. But there is another way of resisting 

 alcohol : it may be used in moderation or altogether abjured. 

 When this is the nature of the resistance moral evolution takes 

 the place of physical. It is, as a rule, a moral not a physical 

 test that alcohol applies to young men belonging to the upper 



