ed bodies, how many ruined
minds, how much misery pretending to be gay, how much gaiety feeling
itself to be miserable, how much after mental pain, how much eating and
transmitted disease. And in the moral part of the world, how many minds
are racked by incessant anxiety, how many thoughtful imaginations which
might have left something to mankind are debased to mean cares, how
much every successive generation sacrifices to the next, how little
does any of them make of itself in comparison with what might be. And
how many Irelands have there been in the world where men would have
been contented and happy if they had only been fewer; how many more
Irelands would there have been if the intrusive numbers had not been
kept down by infanticide and vice and misery. How painful is the
conclusion that it is dubious whether all the machines and inventions
of mankind 'have yet lightened the day's labour of a human being.' They
have enabled more people to exist, but these people work just as hard
and are just as mean and miserable as the elder and the fewer.

But it will be said of this passion just as it was said of the passion
of activity. Granted that it is in excess, how can you say, how on
earth can anyone say, that government by discussion can in any way cure
or diminish, it? Cure this evil that government certainly will not; but
tend to diminish it--I think it does and may. To show that I am not
making premises to support a conclusion so abnormal, I will quote a
passage from Mr. Spencer, the philosopher who has done most to
illustrate this subject:--

'That future progress of civilisation which the never-ceasing pressure
of population must produce, will be accompanied by an enhanced cost of
Individuation, both in structure and function; and more especially in
nervous structure and function. The peaceful struggle for existence in
societies ever growing more crowded and more complicated, must have for
its concomitant an increase of the great nervous centres in mass, in
complexity, in activity. The larger body of emotion needed as a
fountain of energy for men who have to hold their places and rear their
families under the intensifying competition of social life, is, other
things equal, the correlative of larger brain. Those higher feelings
presupposed by the better self-regulation which, in a better society,
can alone enable the individual to leave a persistent posterity, are,
other things equal, the correlatives of a more com