THE PHYSICAL DEGENERACY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
DR, BEDDOE'S argument, read before the British Association in Edinburgh as to the degeneracy of Englishmen is physique, does not seem to have excited much attention or ten- dency to excited discussion, and we do not wonder at the neglect. Ordinary people will not believe an argument, however carefully put, so opposed to the evidence of their senses, and the few who have examined the matter carefully have made up their minds that the evil of which Dr. Beddoe complains is temporary, partial, and affords no just ground of alarm. If there is one fact certain in the history of the world, it is that the notion of the physical degeneration of the human race, which pervades all literatures, has infected all creeds, and has been embodied in almost all histories, rests upon no evidence whatever. Abraham would not be more noticed in Syria for his size than any Sheik who traces to him his ancestry. There is no record worthy a moment's attention of any race who, if stripped and disarmed and put opposite an equal num- ber of English navvies equally stripped and disarmed, would not in ten minutes be smashed into indistinguishable jelly. The earliest pictures we possess of human beings, those on the Egyptian monuments, display a people slighter, shorter, and with altogether lees of all the constituents which make up healthy weight than the English of to-day. The mummies are here in London for us to see ; they are the bodies of nobles, warriors, priests, and other picked and well-fed men, and they are distinctly smaller than the mummies of the same class of Englishmen would be likely to be. Greek statues, when intended to be life size, are the simulacra, as far as weight goes, of Greek men and women as we see them now. The oldest coins give no hint of people in auy way differ- ent from ourselves, least of all of people in any way bigger. The soldier of Pharaoh was very like a Sikh, and a Greek athlete would have recognized his own type in Leotard, the trapeze per- former. The notion that civilization weakens is just as baseless. The people who still exist in a state of nature are, with the ex- ception of the negroes of the Upper Nile, if Werne's account of them is aocurate, rather slighter persons than ourselves, and possess no physical qualities whatever which Englishmen simi- larly trained would be without. An average New Zealander or Kaffir is about the equal of an average Englishman, and no other savage is even that. Most savages would be as hopelessly beaten in a naked contest with au Englishman trained to their
work as an untrained Englishman would be by a Westmoreland wrestler, and a very largo proportion of them are greatly inferior to any Western men, could not enter into any physical contest with them with any hope of victory. The most perfect savage of mankind, the Veddah or the Andamanese, would be strangled by a London costermonger in three minutes, and the Rod Indian warrior in the highest condition is, apart altogether from the differences created by civilization, wholly unable to encounter the Kentuckian. The Kentuckian can crush his ribs at the first hug. An Anglo-Saxon pedestrian with anything like the Indian's train- ing can beat him even in endurance, while he can carry nearly twice the weight the other can lift. The armour in our museums is not the armour of the commonalty, but of knights whose motto was that of the Earls of Cranstoun, most honest of aristocrats, -" Thou shalt want ere I want," that is, of specially well-fed men, and if five hundred suits were collected half the House of Com- mons could not get into them. The other half would, no doubt, be horribly tired if they wore them for twelve hours ; but that -arises from want of habit, and indeed the knights would have been as horribly tired themselves. They did not walk habitually in armour, but rode huge dray-horses specially selected -because they could carry weight. There may, of course, in some .prehistoric period have been men of amazing size on earth, just as there were birds like the moo, and immensely big bats ; but of -scientific evidence for any such assertion, or for the kindred assumption that human physique deteriorates under civilization, there is not one trace. The enormous probability is that a Roman -corps of a thousand men was composed of soldiers who would leave seemed to our Lifeguardsmen puny, who were, in fact, of about the average weight that a regiment of born Parisians or Italian citizens would be, though from training iu the exercising- /fields rather broader-chested.
The general argument makes men unwilling to listen to such .assertions, and we do not see much force in Dr. Beddoe's par- ticular allegations. Ire says civilization is dwarfing us all, that Irrenchmen were beaten by Germans because of their inferior physique—as if Jena had not happened as well as Sedan, or as if (Germans had not conquered those tall Poles—and that the degen- -eracy is mainly due to city life. Why is it due to city life ? Because of the unhealthiness of the employments usual in cities? Many of them, as, for example, the printing of daily papers or the watching of wool machines are no doubt unhealthy—though the fact that they are carried on under cover, while agricultural 'labourers get wet, ought to be taken into the account—but where is the proof that a short-lived father produces 'an inferior son ? It is not the circumstances of the situation which are reproduced, but the normal type, and you might blind sheep for ever by making them stare at snow without securing an eyeless or blear-eyed breed of lambs. The pale and over-worked 'factory hand might, granted good food, good air, and good -exercise, rear children as savagely healthy as the farmer, and the tendency among children to be healthy will last hundreds of years, or probably, if we may judge from some evidence procur- able in Bengal, for ever. The Bengalees have certainly been puny people for six hundred years, probably for double that period, the evidence being their extreme reluctance to fight; but the children of native Christians are not puny, are often as big as the
-fighting races of the North. Two generations of the generous diet 'forbidden to the Beugalee by his creed has increased their weight -one-third, and the weight of their skeletons in almost equal proportion. Bad food, no doubt, makes men puny, though, by 'the way, some underfed races, notably the Irish, are exceptionally tine men ; but there is no reason in the world why citizens should 'be worse fed than countrymen. On the contrary, as the country- men come to the cities for profit, the probability- is incontestable that they will be better fed, and we believe, as a matter of fact, that au this country they are. The citizens got more meat, better bread, -better beer, and except in a few districts just as much milk, that is next to none at all. A Manchester artisan is a better nourished man 'than the average Euglish labourer ; ask him himself if ho is not, -or if you disbelieve him, ask any Lancashire doctor who worked through the cotton famine, and who will tell you that the artisans palpably benefited in health by their more restricted diet. Then, says Dr. Beddoo, modern science, by keeping alive the feeble, tends to make the type feeble ; but apart from actual disease, feebleness is not a necessarily transmitted quality, and his own data are directly opposed to his own conclusion. " The classes that yield the largest number of births are, beginning with the least important,—(1) fishermen ; (2) miners, especially coal-miners, and the like ; (3) the proletariat of large towns." Dr. Beddoe admits that the fishermen and miners aro men of good physique, and surely the presumption is that the proletariat of large towns is the the same, that is to say potentially, and apart from accidents which do not affect the race. Dr. Beddoe seems to think that because a machine-tender at forty has a pale face, and a con- tracted chest, and perhaps a stoop in his shoulders, therefore his children, born when he was half that age, will be born old men. So far from the city proletariat being a specially weak class, it is very often, as in London, the greatest of cities, a specially strong class, and under decently favourable conditions as to diet turns out exceptionally strong men. Just put a hundred Essex labourers into a field opposite a hundred sailors from the London Ragged Schools, street Arabs originally, the children of every kind of underfed, hard-drinking, vicious parent, and see the pommelling the countrymen will get. City life, and above all, city forms of labour, may not be favourable to health— though we doubt that, when we compare artizans of sixty with labourers of that age—but the effect of that life and those forms of labour upon the individual are not identical with their effect upon the race. Because a man's eyes are destroyed by lightning at fourteen, that is no reason his children should be born blind. The President of the section, Professor W. Turner, observed that men's teeth were certainly getting worse, the teeth in ancient crania being decidedly better than the tooth in modern skulls, and his statement tallies, as we know, with the belief of eminent dentists ; but it is in itself no proof of degeneracy. Some cause or other connected with diet—in all probability the entirely new habit of swallowing hot liquids twice or thrice a day—does injure modern teeth ; but the teeth of each successive crop of infants come up as perfect as ever. To prove degeneracy in teeth, we should have to prove not that the teeth suffer from our habits, but that they are worse when they first start up, and before the habits have time to tell.
We cannot expect Dr. Beddoo to accept our opinions, though based on the opinions of much better physiologists than ourselves ; but perhaps ho may pay some attention to the facts collected by M. Dunant, of Geneva. That gentleman has carefully examined the records of recruiting in the canton of Fribourg, Switzerland, for sixteen years, which supply every detail respecting 11,505 young men of twenty years of age, and more especially their birth- place, their raoe, and their height. After minute study on that large scabs, ho comes to the conclusion that the one and sole cause of the immense differences of height among men in Fribourg is race ; that no other cause, not even the height of the villages above the sea, has the smallest effect, and establishes, moreover, the odd fact that on the whole the tall men produced an immense proportion —in fact all, the figures being 2,663 out of 2,869—of those rejected for want of physical health. It follows that a peculiarity of race like height, however originally acquired, is nearly unchangeable ; that conditions have comparatively little to do with it, and that large size and health have no relation at all, precisely the points which Dr. Beddoo to prove his ease must disprove. When he has done so, perhaps ho will account for the ease of the Western Jews, who, after a thousand years of persecution, of living in cities only, of living in the most crowded sections of the most diseased quarters of those cities, after devoting themselves exclusively to sedentary pursuits, after abstaining for centuries from war, from military exercises, and from country sports, are to-day just as large as other men, just as brave, and iu all countries very excep- tionally healthy. Wo believe that the whole of this popular theory of deterioration in cities is originally the protest of the boor against the superiority of the citizen, whom he pretends to despise because he is pale, but who can and does do double his work ; who can outrun him, outleap him, and outtalk him, and if he happens to turn poacher, defeat him in open fight. A London rough may be, and very often is, an obscene brute ; but lie will give any countryman in England, not being a Celt, two stone, and then " thrash his head off." Whom is it that he as a mere animal has degenerated from, the Knight whose armour is three inches too short for him, or the yeoman whose bow he can wield as easily as at Agiucourt ?
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