A Healthy Citizenship.

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tilities of brain and hand, new instruments and methods of production. Our faith in God may whisper to us that, if He is in the heaven, all shall be well with His world.

In its own

But one thing is incumbent on us. interest, and with a view to social health and happiness, society is bound to do what a wise providence of mind directs, towards the securing of a physically, intellectually, and morally fit citizenship. Some words of Professor Huxley, bearing on this, are remarkable for the passion which he has infused into them. "So long," he writes, “as unlimited multiplication goes on, no social organisation which has ever been devised, or is likely to be devised, no fiddle-faddling with the distribution of wealth, will deliver society from the tendency to be destroyed by the reproduction within itself, in its intensest forms, of that struggle for existence, the limitation of which is the object of society. However shocking to the moral sense the eternal competition of man against man, or of nation against nation, may be, and however revolting may be the accumulation of misery at the negative pole of society, with that of wealth at the positive pole, this state of things must abide and grow continually worse, so long as Istar holds her sway unchecked. It is the true riddle of the Sphinx, and every nation which does not

solve it will, sooner or later, be destroyed by the monster which itself has generated."1

A grave feature in this "riddle of the Sphinx" is that the multiplication alluded to is most striking in the classes which are least able to bear it. In England, the growth in these classes is at the rate of one thousand for each day in the year. The two checks that Malthusianism would impose on this growth are, the preventive and the punitive. Under the former of these heads, there are hints, if not proposals, from which a healthy Christian instinct revolts. But the preventions to be desiderated are, obedience to the behests of prudence, and the strengthening of the nobler elements in human nature as against the baser. To glance at only one point. When all circumstances are favourable, early marriages are, speaking generally, better than marriages in later life. But those which are entered into when lads are scarcely out of their teens, and not out of their apprenticeships, and when girls are not much more than in their teens, are far from being a blessing. Almost certainly, the consequences of such unions are, homes whose scanty furnishing has involved their occupants in debt which henceforth clings to them, like a millstone around the neck, making tempers sour and conduct reckless; 1 Nineteenth Century, February 1888.

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and what is more serious still-an offspring puny, sickly, and pithless. One of the conditions of citizenship which Ruskin lays down is, that children be well-born, and by this phrase he means that which is wanting in the case referred to.1 Taking a wider view, children are not wellborn when, as with multitudes, there is no sense of responsibility as to fatherhood and motherhood, and as to the lives that are brought into the world, and when mere animal appetite dominates over the rational, reflective self. Then, the operation of punitive checks is only too certain; and the operation brings not only misery to individuals, but a hurt and loss to society. No drastic measure, relating to population, can be conceived of that would not drag behind it a train of evils; but all who seek the real good of the people are bound to do their utmost to raise the ideals of parentage, to deliver their world from the harm of ill-born children, and, as the only efficient check on lust, so to strengthen the intellectual and moral nature that what is grossly sensual shall be subordinated to "nobler loves and higher cares." On this subject, more cannot be said; but less it is impossible to say, when we consider the problem of population, and the conditions of vigorous social life.

1 He includes more: see 'Time and Tide,' p. 123.

When we analyse the constituents of population, we are at once arrested by the distinctness of the opposition between the two poles of our civilisation.

The aggregate wealth of Great Britain is enormous, and its growth in recent years has been by leaps and bounds. In the United States of America, the annual percentage of increase is more remarkable. There, for some time, this percentage has been nearly three times in excess of the increase of population. In his last message to Congress, President McKinley referred to the wonderful record of commercial and industrial progress during 1900. He noted that, "for the first time in the history of the States, the imports and exports had exceeded two billions of dollars; the increase of exports in that year over the previous amounting to between 167 and 168 millions of dollars, and the increase of imports amounting to nearly 153 millions." But, though the tale to be told concerning the United Kingdom does not exhibit such phenomenal results, it is one represented by notable figures. In 1899, the total value of imports and exports taken together was between 814 and 815 millions sterling, showing an increase over the previous year of 50 millions. The total annual income may be set down as upwards of £1,700,000,000, allowing for each per

Wealth and Poverty.

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son-man, woman, child-on an average about £40 per annum, and for each male about £170 per annum.1 Now, no sensible person supposes that an equality of share in the nation's wealth by the nation's citizenship is possible; but, in view of the immense totals of wealth which these statistics indicate, the appalling prevalence of poverty jars on the mind. One who visits the nethermost places in New York and Chicago, and observes, not, perhaps, the sodden and hideous depravity which is evident among the submerged tenths in London, and in the older European cities, but still enough and to spare of black, squalid wretchedness, recalls the two billions of dollars which the imports and exports had exceeded, and asks why this mass of impoverished life should be so vast and solid. Long dark shadows seem always to rest on material progress. Hitherto, it is affirmed, the tendency has been towards the accumulation of riches in the hands of the well-to-do, money making money, and, in the measure of this accumulation, towards rendering the poverty of the poor more abject and hopeless. There is exaggeration, sometimes culpable exaggeration, in many of the statements that are based on this affirmation; for, life-averages and conditions have been greatly improved Mulhall, Dictionary of Statistics, p. 245.

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