Within the same period the increase in the rural population
is less than a quarter of one million. Three out of five
recruits for the army are rejected; a large proportion of
them because their teeth are gone or decayed. Do these
figures need comment? Can you look for sound minds in such
unsound bodies? Can you look for manliness, for self-
respect, and self-control, or anything but animalistic
sentimentality?
It is not the character of our drama or of our works of
fiction that promotes and fosters this propensity; but may it
not be that the enormous increase in the number of theatres,
and the prodigious supply of novels, may have a share in it,
by their exorbitant appeal to the emotional, and hence
neurotic, elements of our nature? If such considerations
apply mainly to dwellers in overcrowded towns, there is yet
another cause which may operate on those more favoured, - the
vast increase in wealth and luxury. Wherever these have
grown to excess, whether in Babylon, or Nineveh, or Thebes,
or Alexandria, or Rome, they have been the symptoms of
decadence, and forerunners of the nation's collapse.
Let us be humane, let us abhor the horrors of war, and strain
our utmost energies to avert them. But we might as well
forbid the use of surgical instruments as the weapons that
are most destructive in warfare.
