SIR,—Most evolutionists believe that the moral sense has been the
last mental faculty to appear, and that even within historical times it has undergone a marked accentuation in all civilised nations. There is strong evidence that the moral sense is undergoing still further evolution, and that it is now operating in regard to matters of which it took no cognisance even a hundred years ago.
I need only mention, as proof of this, the present feelings of society about slavery, slum life, and the treatment of animals, and point to the general strenuousness of life nowadays. Religion, jurisprudence, and social effort have always appealed to the sanctions of the moral sense, with enormous benefit to man- kind. There has been no successful movement for man's good of any importance without a moral force as its driving-wheel. A question of supreme importance that I have never seen adequately treated arises out of this fact : How can this driving-wheel be applied to the great modern health problem ? On a man's general and brain health depend his happiness, his power of work, his thinking, his feeling, and his conduct. On the health of a community depend its efficiency, its social force, its morality, and its power of further evolution.
The health conditions of our modern life among vast classes are notoriously faulty. Misery, sin, immorality, and de- generation, mental and bodily, manifestly result from this. Efforts have been made in all directions within the past fifty years to remedy these faults of health. Many Acts of Parliament have been passed, while local organisations, official and unpaid, are working for health in all civilised countries with much effect. Medicine and surgery, and the sciences on which they are founded, have lately made such advances that they undoubtedly could ameliorate the health of men and women if there was a moral force in society to compel the practical application of our existing knowledge. No doubt in the public mind there are the beginnings of a tremendously important change of view in regard to disease. The assumption that disease is not inevitable is being slowly realised. Some of the most thoughtful among us are getting, not merely dissatisfied, but self-reproachful as to the health condition of so many of our people. An extension of the moral sense is clearly taking place in this direction. A deep feeling of duty is arising in regard to health. A conviction of health sin is growing, and a yearning for health righteousness is setting in. We all know that most things only get well done when a sense of duty comes in. Conscience is the great monitor against neglected duty. A health conscience is being created which, if it strengthens, will certainly do great things for humanity.
To recognise this as a fact, to tend and cultivate it, to rouse it among all classes of our people, intelligent and stupid, educated and uneducated, as the religious sanctions of morals have been assiduously cultivated for two thousand years, is what I would most earnestly plead for in this letter. People talk with horror of a "Godless education," but they seem to have little fear of an unhygienic education. Our educators need education. A Scotch Professor of Education in a recent address to teachers told them that most of them were ignorant of the very first principles of the physiology of the human brain in its development stage. My experience confirms Professor Edgar's opinion. There are many matters of primary importance to the health and life of our people in regard to which a prevailing health conscience would set effective curative methods to work. The city-degeneracy problem, the housing problem, the nurture-of-children problem, the heredity problem, the alcohol problem, the mental-disease problem, and the marriage-of-the-unfit problem should all be regarded as moral questions for the solution of which a deep responsibility is laid on each of us. Good men should not be able to sleep or rest under such moral burdens till attempts are made to remove them.
I am convinced that the Press must be our chief pulpit for the propagation of the new gospel of health. All men do not now go to church or join sanitary associations, but every man reads his newspaper. Were one-hundredth part of the brains and zeal devoted to current politics given to the stimula- tion of a health conscience and to health efforts, we should soon have measures taken by which our city children would die
only at the rate they do in Westmorland, by which disease and death would be more painless, by which our.children would all have playgrounds as a natural right, through which the irrita- bility and pessimism of the mociern man and woman would bo lessened, and by which the money value of a man would go up through the improvement of his life and strength and nervous energy. The modern democratic idea that every citizen has a right to the essential things that make for health and happiness will in time help to secure good health conditions of body and mink but I believe that they would be still sooner attained, and with less friction, by the development in the nation of a health conscience.
am, Sir, &c., T. S. CLOUSTON, M.D.,
Vice-President Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh.
[We are convinced of the truth of the maxim, "A sound mind in a sound body," and we realise that though a physical degenerate may be a good man, a community with a high percentage of physical degenerates will be a bad community with a downward instead of an upward trend. Therefore we welcome the idea of an awakened health conscience, and trust that men will come to regard offences against the public health as serious crimes. The man whose factory chimneys now pollute the air or whose waste products foul the stream should feel it a matter of conscience to do his best to prevent such contamination, and to keep air and water clean.—En. Spectator.] MR. HERRING'S GIFT OF 2100,000 FOR "SMALL HOLDINGS."
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