THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 1903. CITIES AND DEGENERATION

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 32, 6 August 1903, Page 17

THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 1903. CITIES AND DEGENERATION

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fKON was a child of the free, open air. To him high mountains -were a feeling and ' the hum of human cities torture ' But to the bewic;e;ed and elephantine Johnson country lile was duller than ' the fat weed that rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf.' 'No wise man,' said he, ' will go li\e in the country unless he has something to do -which can be better done in the country.' Yet he had wit enough to see -and say that the decay of the old time military spirit of the English nobility of his day was due to the fact that its members had ' gone into the cty to look for a fortune. 1 The modern movement cityuards thus began at one end of the social scale It seized upon the other after the spinning-jenny, the ' mule,' the power-loom, and the steam-engine had wrought the great industrial levolution in England. During the past sixty years uibun population has moved four times as fast as rural in Great Britain The same process is at work to an alarming extent in all industrial count lies , in others, as in Australia, in a real but lesser degiee And it is fast providing some of tho knottiest problems that ha\e em racked the brains of statesmen.

Ond of the problems created by tins migration of the rural population to cities is that of physical degeneration. A London surgeon is credited with the statement that the London-bred unit tends to die out after the

third generation. Dr. Andrew Wilson, a noted physician, is not prepared to either affirm or deny this statement, but he is emphatically of the opinion that the conditions of city life are unfavorable to the building up of a robust frame. An uneasy interest attaches just now to one phase of this subject—that of national defence. It was brought to the front in a striking way during the South African war by the number of • Brodricks,' or weedy and ill-developed city youths who served in the army, and whose lack of stamina made them the despair of the military authorities and a clog upon the operations of the campaign. At the present time the subject of the physical degeneracy of the industrial population in Great Britain is engaging the anxious attention of the War Office and the Imperial Parliament. Improving thecondition of the city masses will serve as a palliative. Holland's plan of taking the poor from the cities and planting them in country places is a move— though only a small, tentative, and dilettante one— in the right direction. The true remedy is the least likely of adoption. It would mean a reversal of the settled policy of three generations of British statesmen and the changing of England back again to a mainly agricultural country, as it was in the days when it supplied such splendid fighting material to the armies of Marlborough and Wellington.

The peasant, and not the city-bred man, is the backbone of the army. ' But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be "supplied.' The decline— or, rather, the ruin— of agricultural pursuits in England and the rush of its population from country to city, have naturally had a withering effect upon the stamina and fighting value of the unit supplied by it to the defences of the Empire. The army's best' lecruiting grounds in the day of need will ever be the mainly agricultural portions of the Empire— lreland, Scotland, Canada, and the Australasian Colonies. Scotland, according to Mulhall, furnishes four soldiers per thousand inhabitants, England five, and Ireland six. But year by year Ireland's fighting strength and defensive \alue are being drained avvay by a steady flow of emigration which has been caused by the blighting curse of an intolerable land system, and which is transferring to other flags the brain and brawn that, under happier auspices, would be available for the defence of the Empire. ' Oh ' the fightin' races don't die out, If they seldom die in bed.' Better clays are near at hand. And with peace and prosperity at their doors and ' Castle rule ' rooted out o£ the land, the people will speedily forget their long-en-during wrongs, and the waste places will, we hope, again be densely peopled with the strong, moral, and vigorous stock whose indomitable grit and indurance have shown themselves upon a thousand battlefields.