zot, through the
spasmodic, halting, retrograding, advancing, erratic, aimless, and
accidental phases that England has plowed through, from the days of
goutless, simple, and chaste, but barbarian England of the Saxons, to
the present civilized, enlightened, gouty, "Darkest England" of General
Booth; and, after all is said and done, we are no wiser in any practical
resulting good. We simply know that the English people, so to speak,
have, as it were, gone through the figures of some social aspects, as if
dancing the "Lancers," with its forward and back movements, gallop,
etc., and have finally sat down, better dressed and better housed, but
in an acquired state of moral and physical degeneration. The Briton of
Queen Victoria is not the Briton of Queen Boadicea, either morally or
physically. On the other hand, the system of sociological tables adopted
by Herbert Spencer would have but little to record for some six thousand
years--either in religion, morals, or physique--as making any changes in
the history of that simple people which, in the mountainous regions of
Ur, in distant Armenia, started on its pilgrimage of life and racial
existence; in one branch of the family--that of Ishmael--the changes to
be recorded are so invisible that its descendants may really be said to
live to-day as they lived then. So that I do not feel that I need to
apologize for the space I have given to this subject in the course of
the book. The causes that make these racial distinctions should be of
interest alike to the moralist, theologist, sociologist, and to the
physician.

Ecclesiastical writers and moralists, as well as writers of fiction or
dramatizers, can write on anything they please, and it is eagerly taken
up and read by the people generally, either of high or low degree,
alike; and somehow these people seem never to require an apology on the
part of the author, for having attempted rapes, seductions, or even
unavoidable fornication committed through the leaves of the story, or
having it imaginably take place between acts on the stage. But if the
physician writes a book touching anything connected with the generative
functions, and with the best intent and for the good of humanity, he is
expected to make some prefatory apology. He is supposed to address a
public who all of a sudden have become intensely moral and extremely
sensitive in their modesty. Why things are thus I cannot explain. They
are so, nevertheless. From the time tha