have made them a favoured class in respect
of health: to wit, by the notable expedient of dissuading them from
exposing themselves to any of the risks peculiarly attendant on
missionary enterprise. 'Tropical fever, for example, is due to many
subtle causes which are partly under man's control. A single hour's
exposure to sun, or wet, or fatigue, or mental agitation will determine
an attack.' What more simple than for God so to 'act on the minds of
the missionaries as to disincline them to take those courses which might
result in mischance, such as the forced march, the wetting, the
abstinence from food, or the night exposure?' What more simple, either,
it may be added, than for God to save prayerful soldiers from ever being
killed in battle by merely putting it into their minds to desert
whenever they are ordered upon active service?

That 'the distribution of still-births is wholly unaffected by piety'
Mr. Galton has satisfied himself by finding, 'on examination of a
particular period, that the proportion of such births published in the
'Record' newspaper and in the 'Times' bore an identical relation to the
total number of deaths.' He had previously, we must suppose, satisfied
himself that advertisers in the 'Times' never say their prayers.

For the asserted commonness of religious madness Mr. Galton cites no
evidence whatever, and, to judge from the sympathies and antipathies of
which one of his avowed opinions may be supposed to be the subject and
the object, speaks probably on this point solely from hearsay. Very
possibly, however, his assurance of the extraordinary prevalence of
insanity among British noblemen may be based on personal observation,
as, of course, is that regarding the prayerlessness of his own ducal
acquaintances. Birds of a feather, proverbially, flock together, and the
same touch of irreligion may quite possibly suffice to make certain
dukes and certain commoners kin.

Against the inefficiency, however notorious, of the clerical element in
business committees, ought in fairness to be set the equally notorious
efficiency of Jesuits in whatever they undertake, the signal statecraft
displayed by the Wolseys, the Richelieus, and the Ximenes's of the days
in which cardinals and archbishops were permitted to take a leading
part in executive politics, and the very respectable figure still
presented by the lords spiritual, beside the lords temporal of the
British House of Peers. As for 'the common week