60 Human Physiology. 



training which precedes and accompanies the field-work, which, 

 while it confirms the coarseness, saps the morality. It is the 

 herding together of girls and boys, young men and young 

 women, in the one room of the insufficient and crowded 

 cottage. It is the enforced and unnatural suppression of the 

 native instinct of modesty in the miserable hovels which the 

 unwise and unholy parsimony of the landlord or the speculator 

 has stinted in quantity and quality. It is the foul and incest- 

 uous life in the cottage which generates the open and flagrant 

 immorality in the fields." No doubt there must be a previous 

 demoralisation which makes the scandals of such labour gangs 

 possible. Another writer on the crowded dwellings of the poor 

 says "What must be the state of morals in such deplorable 

 circumstances? Prostitution has become a rule; incest is by 

 no means uncommon in a family, which is compelled to 

 live in a single room sometimes on a common litter where 

 father, mother, sister, and brother pig together like domestic 

 animals." 



One of the Commissioners of education gives the following 

 account of the moral condition of one of the mining districts in 

 .South Wales: "Evil in every shape is rampant here; demoral- 

 isation is everywhere dominant; and all good influences are 

 comparatively powerless. The people drink to the most brutal 

 excess; they have little regard for modesty or truth ; and even 

 the little children in the streets, who can scarcely articulate, 

 give utterance to imprecations. The bodies and the habits 

 of the people are almost as dirty as the towns and houses 

 of the swarthy region in which they swarm. The whole 

 district, with the exception of Newport, teems with crime, 

 and all the slatternly accompaniments of animal power 

 and! moral disorder, with scarcely a ray of spiritual and 

 mental intelligence. The people are savage in their manner, 

 and mimic the repulsive rudeness of those in authority over 

 them." 



