nd light, sufficient physical
exercise combined with steady work for the brain, which requires
exercise as much as the other organs; this is just what is wanting
among the poor, in the town and in the factory. Instead of this they
are offered unhealthy nocturnal pleasures and a prostitution which
spreads itself everywhere with all the dangerous effects we have
described. The result is that they become incapable of nourishing and
raising their children properly, often even of procreating them in
healthy and natural love.

Such are the conditions of the lower classes in large towns. Along
with prostitution, venereal disease and alcohol, the wretched
dwellings in many places lead to infamous promiscuity. In factories
and mines things are still worse. In these places there is a swarm of
people continually engaged in most unhealthy occupations, and only
leaving their work to indulge in the most repugnant sexual excesses.
The rapacity, frivolity and luxury of society lead to alcoholism,
poverty, promiscuity and prostitution among the lower classes and
cause complete degeneration of entire industrial populations.

In the Canton of Zurich I have had the opportunity of closely
observing the physical and moral effects of this degeneration. The
individuals most incapable as hospital attendants were always factory
hands. These wretched beings were generally so atrophied in body and
mind that they were no use for anything except the weaving of silk and
cotton. In the large English towns, such as Liverpool, and among the
population of certain mining districts in Belgium, I have met with
even worse degeneration of the human species. Modesty, morality and
health are destroyed in this swarming human mass--dirty, anaemic,
tuberculous, rickety, imbecile, or hysterical--and there is no
distinction between the factory girl and the prostitute. In certain
Belgian districts which are a prey to alcoholism, one sometimes sees
human beings copulating in the streets like animals, or like the
drunken Kaffirs in South Africa. What can we expect from the
descendants of a population so completely degenerate? Marriage and
even concubinage among peasants is golden in comparison!

I will now draw attention to a contemporary phenomenon of the greatest
interest. The immense development of means of transport, combined with
progress in the sanitation of dwellings, favors the transportation of
town to country and country to town. This brings together the t