estants or Catholics. They have been as a rule
singularly free from the kinds of vice that do most to enfeeble and
corrode a race. They are distinguished for their domestic virtues,
especially for care of their children, and they are nearly everywhere
less addicted than Christian nations to intoxicating drinks. These
things help to explain the curious fact that in nearly all countries
the average duration of life is considerably longer among Jews than
among Christians. This superiority is general, but, as M.
Leroy-Beaulieu observes, it tends to diminish in Western countries
where Jews, being freed from disabilities, are more assimilated to the
surrounding populations. They now usually marry later than Christians;
they have on the whole fewer children, but a proportionately larger
number of Jewish than of Christian infants attain adult age. M.
Leroy-Beaulieu mentions two curious facts which are less easy to
explain. Still-born births are very rare among Jews, and there is
among them a wholly abnormal preponderance of male births over female
ones.
It might be supposed from these facts that the Jews were a robust
race, but no one who has come much in contact with them will share
this delusion. Nothing is more conspicuous among them than their
unhealthy colouring, their frail, bent, and feeble bodies. They
develop early, but they have very little of the spring and buoyancy of
youth and they have everywhere a low average of physical strength.
Malformations and deformities are common among them; their nervous
organisation is extremely sensitive, and though they are as a race
distinguished for their sound, clear, and practical judgment, they are
very liable to insanity and to other nervous and brain disorders.
Physical beauty as well as physical strength is much rarer among them
than among Christians.
The causes of this inferiority may be easily explained. Life pursued
during many generations in the crowded Ghetto; the sordid habits that
grow out of extreme poverty and out of the assumption of the
appearance of poverty, which is natural in a persecuted and plundered
race, go far to explain it; but there is another and, I think, a more
important cause which M. Leroy-Beaulieu has rather strangely
neglected. Physical strength and beauty can be maintained at a high
level in crowded town populations only by a constant influx from the
country. The pure air and the healthy labour of the fields are their
main source. This great s
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