H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 201 
but that in recent years improved standards of social or individual hygiene 
and comfort have done much to neutralise specific causes of ill-health. 
It may also be taken as proven that such ill-health is the greatest cause 
of stunting of physique. As in the past the countryside has been freer 
from these morbid influences, the country-man has been the physical 
superior of the townsman, comparing class with class. 
There are three main ways in which the growth of towns and of the 
industrial system has prejudiced the health and thus the physique of 
the nation: adverse conditions of work which had little influence prior 
to the eighteenth century, unhygienic housing and bad feeding, which in 
varied ways have exerted their effects throughout a large part of human 
history. Some of these would be peculiar to the town, others would fall 
indifferently on town and country, and on all social classes save perhaps 
the very wealthiest, though even they could not entirely escape. The 
contrast is less vivid than would appear at first sight: the country child 
can get fresher food, it is true, but less of it perhaps, owing to the lower 
wages of his parents, though he often eats margarine, the butter being 
sold in the towns; he gets fresher air outside but not indoors, since the 
country cottage may be as dark, ill-ventilated and overcrowded as any 
in a city court. 
The greatest change in the conditions of work was the rise of the 
factory, involving long confinement in monotonously ventilated rooms, 
as opposed to work in the open at the door of the home. Industrial 
centres may have been established in Roman times, but thence after for a 
thousand years and more they did not exist, and agriculture was the only 
important industry. The only factories were the local wind- or water-mills ; 
there were local industries in cloth, linen or metals, but the great centres 
of to-day were non-existent. 
The early factory was an extension of the home. Ure said: ‘The 
workshop of the weaver was a rural cottage, from which when he was tired 
of sedentary labour he could sally forth into his little garden and with 
spade or hoe tend its culinary productions.’ ** Woollen weavers practised 
agriculture as a by-employment as late as the early part of the last 
century. The introduction of water- and steam-driven machinery 
aggregated the populations into the northern towns which arose near the 
sources of the power, and put a premium on the employment of children 
who could then do work which formerly required a man’s strength. When 
local supplies ran short, children were procured from workhouses, even 
from as far off as London. Hunt, in his * Political History of England,’ *® 
says: ‘ From little more than infancy they laboured for long hours, thirteen 
or more a day, in rooms badly ventilated and injurious to health. They 
were half starved and cruelly punished. Such of them as survived the 
prolonged misery and torture of their early days, grew up more or less 
stunted and deformed men and women, physically unfit for parentage, 
morally debased, ignorant and brutalised by ill-treatment.’ The mills 
were hotbeds of ‘ putrid’ fever, and the morbidity and mortality rates 
were appalling. In recent years the general hygiene of the worker, together 
_ with the removal of industrial risks, has made enormous strides, the result 
being apparent in the falling death rate and the healthier children. 
28 Ure, Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain. 
29 Hunt, Political History of England, vol. x. 
