-rates. Many town influences, which do not appreciably
affect mortality, distinctly lower the vitality, which must be taken as
the physical measure of the value of life. The denizens of city slums
not only die twice as fast as their country cousins, but their health
and vigour is less during the time they live.

A fair consideration of these facts discloses something much more
important than a mere change in social and industrial conditions. Linked
with this change we see a deterioration of the physique of the race as a
distinct factor in the problem of city poverty. This is no vague
speculation, but a strongly-supported hypothesis, which deserves most
serious attention. Dr. Ogle, who has done much work in elucidation of
this point, sums up in the following striking language--

"The combined effect of this constantly higher mortality in the towns,
and of the constant immigration into it of the pick of the rural
population, must clearly be a gradual deterioration of the whole,
inasmuch as the more energetic and vigorous members of the community are
consumed more rapidly than the rest of the population. The system is one
which leads to the survival of the unfittest."

Thus the city figures as a mighty vampire, continually sucking the
strongest blood of the country to keep up the abnormal supply of energy
it has to give out in the excitement of a too fast and unwholesome life.
Whether the science of the future may not supply some decentralizing
agency, which shall reverse the centralizing force of modern industry,
is not a wholly frivolous speculation to suggest. Some sanguine
imaginations already foresee the time when those great natural forces,
the economical use of which has compelled men and women to crowd into
factories in great cities, may be distributable with such ease and
cheapness over the whole surface of the land as no longer to require
that close local relation which means overcrowding in work and in home
life. If science could do this it would confer upon humanity an
advantage far less equivocal than that which belongs to the present
reign of iron and steam.

Sec. 7. The Extent of Foreign Immigration.--So much for the inflow from the
country districts. But there is another inflow which is drawing close
attention, the inflow of cheap foreign labour into our towns. Here again
we have first to guard against some exaggeration. It is not true that
German, Polish, and Russian Jews are coming over in large battal