^07 LAND REFORM 



the appalling conditions under which masses of the 

 people of this country are living. It should then be 

 the duty of those who feel responsibility in connection 

 with the subject to seek for the cause of the evils of 

 which these conditions are but symptoms. Let the 

 perplexed philanthropist read the dismaying accounts 

 of low vitality, overcrowding, underfeeding, infant- 

 mortality, diminishing birth-rate, anajmic and neurotic 

 disease caused by coarse diet, and of physical decay 

 generally ; let him read them in connection with the 

 arguments and proposals contained in the foregoing 

 chapters, and then judge for himself whether or not 

 these proposals are the fittest and only effective solu- 

 tion of the problem. In the evidence referred to 

 there are a few hopeful opinions given by those who 

 are best qualified to give them. We are told that 80 

 to 85 per cent of children are born physically healthy, 

 "whatever the condition of the mothers may be 

 antecedently," and that deterioration sets in later.^ 

 Another eminent witness, after referring to the influx 

 of the rural population into towns as being detrimental 

 to national physique, states that those bodily defects 

 which are the result of poverty and not of vice are 

 not transmissible from one generation to another, and 

 adds : — 



" To restore therefore the classes in which this 

 inferiority exists to the mean standard of national 

 physique, all that is required is to improve the con- 



^ Evidence of Dr. Edward Malins, President of the Obstetrical 

 Society of London, and Professor of Midwifery in the University of Bir- 

 mingham. Bearing on this question is the fact of the steady decrease 

 in the birth-rate during the past thirty years. According to tlie reports 

 of the Registrar-General the births in 1874 were 36 lu every 1000 persons 

 living. In 1904 they were but 27 to every 1000 persons. 



