As to the physical life, both England and France present the same contrasts, but they are more striking in England. There you have an active and vigorous upper class much enjoying the open air, and a lower class in the big towns living without either pure air or healthy exercise. The physical quality of the race is well maintained, and even improved, at one end of the scale, and deteriorated at the other. Unfortunately the class which deteriorates, the lowest urban class, is not only the more numerous, but also reckless in reproduction, so that its power for degradation is greater than the aristocratic conservative or improving power. The ideal would be a whole nation physically equal to the English aristocracy. That aristocracy has undoubtedly set the example of healthy living, but the objection is that its fine health costs too much. With its immense apparatus of guns, yachts, and horses, its great army of servants, its extensive playgrounds, the aristocracy sets an example that cannot be followed by the poor man, shut up in the atmosphere of a factory all day and sleeping in an ill-drained street at night. The rich have another immense advantage in the free access to natural beauty, which is favourable to cheerfulness and therefore indirectly to health. The ancient Greeks, who led the perfect physical life, were surrounded by noble scenery, glorious in colour. Compare the foul sky and spoilt landscape of Manchester with the purple hills, brilliant sunlight, wondrously clear atmosphere, and waters of intensest azure, that surrounded the City of the Violet Crown! [Sidenote: English and French Middle Classes.] [Sidenote: Peasants.] [Sidenote: Factory Population.] Putting aside the aristocracies of both countries, which may live as healthily as they please, let us examine the state of the middle classes and the common people. The middle classes in both take insufficient out-door exercise, their occupations are too confining and too sedentary, they stiffen prematurely, and after that are fit for nothing but formal walks. Their physical life is lower than that of the aristocracy and lower than that of the agricultural population. The two greatest blessings in our time for the English of the middle class have been velocipedes and volunteering. France has one advantage over England in the numbers of the peasant class, which leads a healthy and active life, though its activity is of a slow and plodding kind. The factory population, proportionally much larger in England, is more unfavourably situated. It undergoes wasting fatigue in bad over-heated air, but it does not get real exercise; consequently, whilst the aristocracy keeps up its strength, the factory population deteriorates. [Sidenote: Comparison of the two Races.]