The inhabitant of towns, it is true, learns his work more quickly, but he lacks patience, perseverance and character, and soon shows himself wanting in the accomplishment of his physical and moral duties. The countryman, on the contrary, is at first slow and clumsy, but soon becomes more capable and careful, and more amenable to education. This shows that, on the average, the hereditary dispositions of the country-bred child are better than those of the town-bred child. The latter develops more rapidly and more completely his natural dispositions, owing to social intercourse, while the country-bred child, although he appears at first sight less intelligent, is really better endowed on the average than the town child. The superficial observer is easily deceived, but country life accumulates more reserve force in the organism than urban life.
Sexual excesses in the country are more conformable to nature. Apart from marriage, we meet with concubinage, infidelity, and sometimes prostitution, but these excesses are never widely spread in small places where every one knows each other. An extensive study of the alcohol question has shown me that hereditary degenerations and sexual evils in the country are principally due to alcoholism and its blastophthoria (vide Chapter I). But when factories, mining industries, etc., create unhealthy conditions in the country, the evil influences of urban life are implanted there, often in a still higher degree.
The society of large towns is made up of many different circles, who have little or no relations with each other, do not know each other, and seldom concern themselves about each other. The individual is only known in his own circle. This circumstance favors the increase of vice and depravity. In addition to this, the insanitary dwellings, the life of excitement and innumerable pleasures, all tend to produce a restless and unnatural existence. The best conditions of existence for man are contact with nature, air and 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, anæmic, 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 two modes of human life, and in this I see the dawn of salvation in the future. The modern towns of North America, thanks to the great extension of their territory, already resemble the country to a great extent, each house being surrounded by a garden. The electric tramways shorten distances and facilitate this manner of building towns. As means of communication become still more simplified and cheapened, the advantages of country life will be joined to those of the town without suffering from the promiscuity of the latter. The disadvantages of country life consist in atrophy of the intellectual dispositions from want of contact; improvement in means of transport will bring this contact to the country. The result of such distribution of the territory of a civilized state, such as I have in view, might be called an Agropolis—an urbanized country or a countrified town. It would then be possible to live a life more ideal in human sentiments, and healthier as regards material and sexual matters.
The state of the countryman or peasant is advantageous for marriage, not only because it does not offer such a suitable soil for prostitution, but because the danger of venereal disease is diminished, and the procreation of healthy offspring favors conjugal happiness and constancy in sexual union. From the religious point of view, the freedom in sexual intercourse which prevails among country people before marriage is looked upon as immoral; but this is a natural phenomenon similar to the "marriage by trial" of certain savage races, or the "hand-fasting" of the Scotch people, of which we have spoken in Chapter VI. People who tolerate and defend prostitution should be ashamed of their hypocrisy and of the manner in which they distort morality, when in the same breath they reproach peasants with their natural but illegitimate unions.
It is needless to say that other causes of degeneration may exist in the country as well as in towns; for instance, certain endemic diseases, such as myxœdema and malaria, the brutish life of certain tribes, perpetuation of degeneracy by consanguineous unions, etc.
The worst state is certainly that of the proletariat of large towns, which is generally associated with crime. In the community of pimps, criminals and decadents in general, is constituted a special social outlook, which regards the greatest scamp in the light of a hero. When a child shows a precocious criminal disposition it is looked upon in these circles as a child of much promise. Honest and virtuous children are considered in this society as imbeciles, or even as traitors and spies, and are consequently despised, hated and ill-treated. The deleterious influences we have mentioned do not act alone, but are often associated with other factors in causing degeneration of the sexual life. When other influences preponderate, we may sometimes observe depravity in the country, and on the contrary, healthy and normal conditions in certain towns. We must always avoid exaggerating the importance of a single factor in making generalizations. Certain country villages, the inhabitants of which have become alcoholized and degraded, may present a much more unhealthy sexual life than certain sober and well-governed towns.
Vagabondage.—In the Archiv für Rassen und Gesellschafts biologie of 1905 (Archives of the biology of races and of society), Doctor Jörger relates the history of the descendants of a couple of vagabonds, which he carefully studied for several generations. Nearly all the members of this family became vagabonds, thieves, prostitutes, and other society pests. Vain attempts were made to give a good education to some of them, but they ran away from school to lead the lives of vagabonds or criminals. In a few of them only, education gave some results, but not at all brilliant. In this family, alcoholism and its blastophthoria played a considerable part.