illness, but living habitually at a low level of health and with the
depressed spirits and feeble capacity of enjoyment which such a
condition produces, is far from an ideal state, and there is much reason
to fear that this type is an increasing one. Many things in modern life,
among which ill-judged philanthropy and ill-judged legislation have no
small part, contribute to produce it, but two causes probably dominate
over all others. The one is to be found in sanitary science itself,
which enables great numbers of constitutionally weak children who in
other days would have died in infancy to grow up and marry and propagate
a feeble offspring. The other is the steady movement of population from
the country to the towns, which is one of the most conspicuous features
of modern civilisation. These two influences inevitably and powerfully
tend to depress the vitality of a nation, and by doing so to lower the
level of animal spirits which is one of the most essential elements of
happiness. Whether our improved standards of living and our much greater
knowledge of sanitary conditions altogether counteract them is very
doubtful.

In this as in most questions affecting life there are opposite dangers
to be avoided, and wisdom lies mainly in a just sense of proportion and
degree. That sanitary reform, promoted by governments, has on the whole
been a great blessing seems to me scarcely open to reasonable question,
but many of the best judges are of opinion that it may easily be pushed
to dangerous extremes. Pew things are more curious than to observe how
rapidly during the past generation the love of individual liberty has
declined; how contentedly the English race are submitting great
departments of their lives to a web of regulations restricting and
encircling them. Each individual case must be considered on its merits,
and few persons will now deny that the right of adult men and women to
regulate the conditions of their own work and to determine the risks
that they will assume may be wisely infringed in more cases than the
Manchester School would have admitted. At the same time the marked
tendency of this generation to extend the stringency and area of
coercive legislation in the fields of industry and sanitary reform is
one that should be carefully watched. Its exaggerations may in more ways
than one greatly injure the very classes it is intended to benefit.

A somewhat corresponding statement may be made about individual sa