BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1211 



touchstone of moral conduct; and its economic value is inestimable. 

 It is said that three million working days are lost in Great Britain 

 every year from rheumatism alone — say the equivalent of at least 

 eight thousand unemployed. Health has survival value, for 

 individual and for nation alike. 



Now if health is of this high value, it would probably reward the 

 Ministry of Health to discover and ordain apostles of health, at 

 least twelve to begin with, who would be scattered over the country 

 for its mission. We mean men and women of irradiating healthful- 

 ness, as well as keen observation, wide knowledge, and impassioned 

 purpose, who by their daily walk and conversation, as well as by 

 their wise and well-informed precept, would make people feel that 

 health — positive health — is one of the most desirable things in the 

 world, one of the saving graces of life, and correspondingly 

 attainable. 



The indirect appeal is often more potent than the direct; so 

 our beginnings of preservation of Nature, and of beautifying- 

 societies in town and country, from tree-planting and park-making, 

 onwards to garden-villages and city improvements, are already 

 showing wonders towards healthfulness. Ugly rooms, ugly houses 

 (so terribly multiplied of late), ugly streets, ugly towns, work against 

 health. It is easier to live a healthy life in a home than in a hovel. 

 Beauty is a tonic, potent towards health. 



It is a difficult doctrine to live up to, but the socialised and 

 moralised criticism of expenditure may be made one of the most 

 powerful levers of human progress. Where one has any alternative 

 in spending money, one should spend in the direction of occupations 

 and products that make for health. A gift of flowers is biologically 

 better than a turned ivory ornament, and a little picture is 

 psychologically far better than a platinum ring. 



There is no blinking the fact that our communities are being 

 weakened by lack of selection for health. Man has rightly rebelled 

 against the crude and unsparing winnowing of Nature's regime, but 

 he has not yet fully faced, much less organised, the needed trans- 

 cendence of it by a sufficiently resolute and thought-out rational and 

 social selection. This is the "dilemma of civilisation". As Herbert 

 Spencer said: "Any arrangements which, in any considerable degree, 

 prevent superiority from profiting by the rewards of superiority, or 

 shield inferiority from the evils it entails — any arrangements that 

 make it as well to be inferior as to be superior, are arrangements 

 diametrically opposed to the progress of organisation and the reach- 

 ing of a higher life." 



It may seem to some a little thing, but great results would pro- 

 bably follow a more generous social recognition of the pre-eminently 

 healthy. Baby-shows and athletic trainings show beginnings towards 

 this, but it should not be beyond man's wit to devise more social 



