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H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 209 
children’s hospital or infant welfare centre reveals the handicap against 
the children of the mentally inferior parent. 
There remains one important factor bearing on physique—namely, 
emigration. Since the early part of the seventeenth century the British 
Isles have sent abroad large numbers of the most efficient of their people, 
agriculturists and skilled workers of all kinds possessed of just the qualities 
which the nation demands for its own physical good. Where these 
have come from somewhat isolated areas the result has been a steady loss 
of the best, with the consequent replacement in the next generation by the 
offspring of an undue proportion of the next best. This clearly has a 
dysgenic effect, and itis often stated that this is the cause of the inferior 
calibre of the inhabitants of some remote hamlets. This—probably the 
most serious drain to which the nation has been, and still is, exposed— 
can only be regarded with equanimity on the ground that England’s loss 
is the gain of the daughter nations. The emigrants have been largely of 
‘Nordic ’ and ‘ Prospector ’ stocks, seeking a wider scope for their energies, 
and the result will in the end seriously modify the racial composition of 
some parts of the British Isles, particularly Scotland. So far as there 
has been any difference between rural and urban areas it is distinctly 
the former that have supplied the higher proportion of emigrants. Emi- 
gration, indeed, in recent years has been a serious factor in rural 
depopulation. . 
Summarising the whole survey I would submit that a pessimistic view 
of the physical or mental condition of the people of England is unnecessary 
and unfounded. Stature and weight at least are not less than in the days 
of the ‘ Making of England,’ of Agincourt or of Waterloo. The great war 
showed the possession of powers of resistance to physical adversity that 
have never been equalled, and under a test applied to a proportion of 
the nation never before approached, while the versatility of inventive 
powers was demonstrated everywhere. So far as the children are con- 
cerned, education is more general and the ladder wider and more used 
than at any period in our history. The general health of the nation is 
better and the expectation of life longer than ever before. There are no 
grounds for thinking the physical conditions of any class are worse than 
that of corresponding classes at previous epochs, even among those persons 
and classes on whom the adverse conditions of life associated with urbanisa- 
tion and industrialism have pressed hardest and have been least opposed. 
The real increase of the unfit is much less than has been assumed from 
4 priori arguments. Reproductive selection which has a tendency to 
increase the apparently less valuable stocks is opposed by a lethal selection 
which has not been abolished, while emigration from the eugenic standpoint, 
though a real disadvantage to England, has been a source of strength to 
the Empire of Associated Nations. The dysgenic tendencies of industrial- 
ism are being successfully opposed by the higher level of general culture 
and the awakening of a national conscience, but more especially by the 
_ more intelligent care for the children of the nation, in which the application 
of preventive medicine to education is playing no mean part. The 
_ Education Acts, if they have not revealed every child as a potential 
university scholar, have proved the best of Public Health measures ; 
while all available evidence points to the intellectual average being equal 
to that of any other country. Civilisation may be making greater demands 
1924 P 
