6o National Health. 



to understand this let them look with impartial eyes upon the 

 present position of Christian Britain. All the citizens of this 

 free country could drink themselves into all kinds of foul 

 diseases, and their diseased, degraded children filled up the 

 charitable institutions, and a benevolent Government afforded 

 facilities for their doing so as quickly and as easily as possible. 

 Numbers of persons were at large about the streets so thoroughly 

 diseased that their very breath was infectious, and those persons 

 brought into the world year after year whole armies of diseased 

 children for a charitable Government to maintain. In fact, 

 under the present benign Government there was no human 

 being too wretched, too diseased, or too miserable that he could 

 not contract a legal marriage and bring as many wretched and 

 diseased children into the world as he was able to, and the 

 public provided a comfortable existence for all these miserables. 

 He could not but think the number of diseased and degraded 

 humanity was slowly and steadily increasing, and it would soon 

 require an electric lamp to discover a thoroughly healthy human 

 being in this boasted country of ours. It appeared there was 

 hardly such a being as a thoroughly healthy child born into this 

 world, their parents being more or less diseased, and their 

 modern education and examinations were well calculated to 

 destroy the little health that was left. He believed the average 

 health of this nation was twenty-five, and he would like to see 

 the man who would tell him that that was satisfactory. That 

 was no fancy sketch, but a grim and stern reality, as would be 

 seen by considering a few facts and figures which were authenti- 

 cated. If a drunkard only injured himself the loss to the 

 national health would be but little, but the children were weak, 

 puny, and scrofulous, and often idiotic and deaf and dumb. It 

 was estimated that 50 per cent, of the idiots of Massachusetts 

 were the children of intemperate parents. In the ten years 

 following the reduction of the spirit duties in Norway insanity 

 increased 50 per cent., and idiocy among children 150 per cent, 

 in the same period. As to early marriage, also a prolific cause 

 of disease in children, the last census returns showed that there 



