136 NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Con- 

 tinent has heen free from the ravages of such pests 

 as cholera and epidemic typhus, except as mere local 

 and confined outbreaks. 



We have to go a long way farther back to mark 

 the furrows made through the various populations by 

 those once dreaded ploughs of ruin, the plague and 

 smallpox. It is true that famines, and their 

 invariable concomitant epidemic typhus, continue to 

 scourge from time to time some of the provinces of 

 Russia ; but as the social conditions of that country 

 become less Asiatic and more conformed to those of 

 Europe, these pests will disappear. 



Before the year 1875 the mortality columns in the 

 Registrars' returns of all Continental countries bear 

 witness to constantly recurring epidemical visitations. 

 Seldom did a decade pass without one or two, whereby 

 the decennial mortality was raised considerably above 

 the normal mortality of non- pestilential years. Since 

 1875 the statistical columns of no country show the 

 effects of any serious epidemical visitations, though I 

 may remark that the mortality columns of almost all 

 European countries were raised for some years in a 

 rather marked degree by the semi-pestilential influenza 

 which travelled across Europe about the year 1890. 



I now submit a tabulated series of statistics which 

 give for each country the average life of its people in 

 the decenniums 1876-85, and also in the eight years 

 1896-1903, the latter year being the last which at 

 the time of writing is available to me for reference. 



