MENACE OF GREAT TOWNS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 1514, 9 November 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

MENACE OF GREAT TOWNS.

Dr. Max Nowdau contributes to the Hibbert Journal an article on the race degeneration produced by the struggle for existence in great cities. Formerly, ho writes, dogoneratiou only attacked the ruling class of the nations, tho dynasties and the aristocracy. But to-day the conditions are different. Degeneration attacks not only the pinnacle of the social building, but also its broad base; riot a privileged class, but tho whole stratum of the large town population that is to say, a very important part of the people, in some lands even the majority of the nation. There is no doubt that degeneration has its chief home in the large towns, and that the population of the large towns is condemned, as a whole, to degeneracy. The decadence of the peasantry in whole provinces, such as that of the Italian Maremma through fever, that of Normandy through alcoholism, is an exception; but tho decline of the town population is the rule.

The large town: give the highest percentage of crime, insanity, and constitutional diseases the large town is the focus of all the frenzies of fashion, all hysterical aberrations of public opinion, all anarchical movements in politics, social customs, morality. It is in the largo town that celibacy and childlessness are most to bo found.

In the large towns tho tall races are dwarfed; not, indeed, among the patrician class, which has country houses and only spends a part of th© year in the town, but among th© multitude that is born in the town, lives there, and dies there. The stunted farms that wo meet, in the slums of East and South-east London are the descendants of tho gigantic peasants of Saxon Sussex, of Danish and Norwegian Hertford, of Jutic Kent, and of Anglian Northumberland. In the largo town, families which had originally the finest constitution disappear in four or five generations, if they are not renewed by a continual infusion of fresh blood from the

country. In London and Paris—the young cities of America cannot her© com© into question —there are probably not a hundred persons who can show a pedigree of 150 years, consisting, on both sides, of ancestors born only in London or Paris. The large town is an abyss, in which tho population that pours in from the whole country and from foreign lands oozes and trickles away. But I see no practical means of restraining the country population from yielding to the seduction of the town, as the .moth yields to that of the lamp at which it scorches its wings. Th© only thing that the legislator can (Jo is, by . homestead laws, by the cheapest possible agrarian credit, by other measures that I will not recount, for fear of trenching against my will on the field of party politics, to make his native clod so attractive to the peasant that the seductions of the town cannot charm him Jnto migration