The problem of race-regeneration / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The problem of race-regeneration / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/84 page 13
    The Problem of Race-Regeneration CHAPTER I THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT We rightly regard the nineteenth century as a great period of amelioration in the conditions of social life. Undoubtedly such amelioration was urgently needed. The gradual development of industrial invention during the second half of the eighteenth century had produced a dislocation of social life» Machinery, with its enormously increased productive¬ ness, had destroyed the old-fashioned, simple, rough, but fairly wholesome life of rural industry under the domestic roof. The workers were brought into the towns, huddled together under conditions which had not been made for them ; they became more prosperous, indeed, and for a time they increased and multiplied. But their prosperity was not civilisa¬ tion. What the conditions of life were like during the greater part of the first half of the nineteenth cen- tuiy, when scarcely any public money was spent on sanitation in comparison with the vast sums which have since been spent, we know from the famous report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, written in 1842 by Sir Edwin Chadwick. It is a wonderful picture of a vigorous and industrious nation, living—and very often dying—in almost unspeakable filth and disease. 13
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