Another element of comfort may have been the fact, that in the rough education of the forest, only the strong and healthy children lived, while the weakly died off young, and so the labour-market, as we should say now, was never overstocked. This is the case with our own gipsies, and with many savage tribes--the Red Indians, for instance--and accounts for their general healthiness: the unhealthy being all dead, in the first struggle for existence. But then these gipsies, and the Red Indians, do not increase in numbers, but the contrary; while our forefathers increased rapidly. On the other hand, we have, at least throughout the middle ages, accounts of such swarms of cripples, lepers, deformed, and other incapable persons, as to make some men believe that there were more of them, in proportion to the population, than there are now. And it may have been so. The strongest and healthiest men always going off to be killed in war, the weakliest only would be left at home to breed; and so an unhealthy population might spring up. And again--and this is a curious fact--as law and order enter a country, so will the proportion of incapables, in body and mind, increase. In times of war and anarchy, when every one is shifting for himself, only the strongest and shrewdest can stand. Woe to those who cannot take care of themselves. The fools and cowards, the weakly and sickly, are killed, starved, neglected, or in other ways brought to grief. But when law and order come, they protect those who cannot protect themselves, and the fools and cowards, the weakly and sickly, are supported at the public expense, and allowed to increase and multiply as public burdens. I do not say that this is wrong, Heaven forbid! I only state the fact. A government is quite right in defending all alike from the brute competition of nature, whose motto is--Woe to the weak. To the Church of the middle age is due the preaching and the practice of the great Christian doctrine, that society is bound to protect the weak. So far the middle age saw: but no further. For our own times has been reserved the higher and deeper doctrine, that it is the duty of society to make the weak strong; to reform, to cure, and above all, to prevent by education, by sanitary science, by all and every means, the necessity of reforming and of curing.