58 Hziman Physiology. 



Ireland, is one of the most moral countries in the world. Of 

 Sweden, Mr. Lloyd, a recent tourist, says : " It is with 

 regret that I declare the Swedish peasant to be a great 

 drunkard ! Finkel, or potato -brandy, is the curse of the- 

 country ; it stupefies the faculties of the people, and makes 

 them old before their time." In the towns, the proportion 

 of illegitimate to legitimate births is very large, and much 

 on the increase. In Stockholm, in 1848, the last return* 

 noticed by Mr. Lloyd, the legitimate births numbered 1558,. 

 the illegitimate 1301. In the rural districts the proportion 

 was i to 13. 



What is the significance of these statistics? They mean that,, 

 in the lower classes in England and Scotland say the lower 

 third the proportion of children born of unmarried mothers is 

 from 15 to 30 per cent., rising in such counties as Cumberland 

 to 36 per cent. They mean that, in many portions of this 

 country, among the poorer and more ignorant classes, no value 

 is attached to chastity ; that modesty and virtue are unknown ;, 

 that there are licentiousness and promiscuity almost universal. 

 And these figures do not reveal half of the truth. When children 

 are registered as born in wedlock, the marriage of the parents 

 has been, in many cases, the forced result of previous immo- 

 rality. The Pall Mall Gazette says of the frequent and seldom, 

 prosecuted, and lightly punished bigamies of the poor: "A. 

 labouring man must have a housekeeper and a servant, and the 

 Gily possible form in which he can obtain one is in the shape 

 of a wife. That the bigamies of the poor are so little made 

 public in the newspapers, arises partly from the unwillingness 

 of the wives to expose their own unhappiness and ill-usage, 

 and partly because the standard of right and wrong among 

 them is, in so many ways, unlike that which prevails among the 

 rich. What is called 'a misfortune' produces none of the 

 results to a peasant or a city working girl, which it would do< 

 in i higher class of life. And many a woman who has been 



