The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
that shone in every feature of a Walter Scott; of the massive vigor of a Goethe or a Humboldt. How much, too, is said of the physical degeneracy of our own people,—how the jaw is retreating, how the frame is growing slender and gaunt, how the chest flattens, and how tenderly we ought to cherish every octogenarian among us, for that we are seeing the last of them! If this is intended to be a piece of pleasant badinage, far be it from us to arrest a single smile it may awaken. But if it is given as a serious description, from which serious deductions can be drawn, then we say, that, as a delineation, it is, to a considerable extent, purely fanciful,—as an argument, utterly so. The facts, so far as they are ascertained, point unwaveringly to this conclusion,—that every advance of a people in knowledge and refinement is accompanied by as striking an advance in health and strength.
Try this question, if you please, on the largest possible scale. Compare the uneducated savage with his civilized brother. His form has never been bent by confinement in the school-room. Overburdening thoughts have never wasted his frame. And if unremitting exercise amid the free airs of heaven will alone make one strong, then he will be strong. Is the savage stronger? Does he live more years? Can he compete side by side with civilized races in the struggle for existence? Just the opposite is true. Our puny boys, as we sometimes call them, in our colleges, will weigh more, lift more, endure more than any barbarian race of them all. This day the gentle Sandwich-Islanders are wasting like snow-wreaths, in contact with educated races. This day our red men are being swept before advancing civilization like leaves before the breath of the hurricane. And it requires no prophet's eye to see, that, if we do not give the black man education as well as freedom, an unshackled mind as well as unshackled limbs, he, too, will share the same fate.
To all this it may naturally be objected, that the reason so many savage races do not display the greatest physical stamina is not so much intellectual barrenness as their vices, native or acquired,—or because they bring no wisdom to the conduct of life, but dwell in smoky huts, eat unhealthy food, go from starvation to plethora and from plethora to starvation again, exchange the indolent lethargy which is the law of savage life for the frantic struggles of war or the chase which diversify and break up its monotony. Allow the objection; and then what have we accomplished, but carrying the argument one step back? For what are self-control and self-care, but the just fruits of intelligence? But in truth it is a combination of all these influences, and not any of them alone, that enables the civilized man to outlive and outrival his barbarian brother. He succeeds, not simply because of the superior address and sagacity which education gives him, though that, no doubt, has much to do with it; not altogether because his habits of life are better, though we would not underrate their value; but equally because the culture of the brain gives a finer life to every red drop in his arteries, and greater hardihood to every fibre which is woven into his flesh. If it is not so, how do you explain the fact that our colored soldier, fighting in his native climate, with the same exposure in health and the same care in sickness, succumbs to wounds and diseases over which his white comrade triumphs? Or how will you explain analogous facts in the history of disease among other uneducated races? Our explanation is simple. As the slightest interfusion of carbon may change the dull iron into trenchant steel, so intelligence working through invisible channels may add a new temper to the physical nature. And thus it may be strictly true that it is not only the mind and soul which slavery and ignorance wrong, but the body just as much.
It may be said, and perhaps justly, that a comparison between races so unlike is not a fair comparison. Take, then, if you prefer, the intelligent and unintelligent periods in the history of the same race. The old knights! Those men with mail-clad bodies and iron natures, who stand out in imagination as symbols of masculine strength! The old knights! They were not scholars. Their constitutions were not ruined by study, or by superfluous sainthood of any kind. They were more at home with the sword than the pen. They loved better "to hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak." So their minds were sufficiently dormant. How was it with their bodies? Were they sturdier men? Did they stand heavier on their feet than their descendants? It is a familiar fact that the armor which inclosed them will not hold those whom we call their degenerate children. A friend tells me that in the armory of London Tower there are preserved scores, if not hundreds, of the swords of those terrible Northmen, those Vikings, who, ten centuries ago, swept the seas and were the dread of all Europe, and that scarcely one of them has a hilt large enough to be grasped by a man of this generation. Of races who have left behind them no methodical records, and whose story is preserved only in the rude rhymes of their poets and ruder chronicles, it is not safe to make positive affirmations; but all the indications are that the student of to-day is a larger and stronger man than the warrior of the Middle Ages.
If we come down to periods of historical certainty, no one will doubt that the England of the present hour is more educated than the England of fifty years ago, or that the England of fifty years since had a broader diffusion of intelligence than the England of a century previous. Yet that very intelligence has prolonged life. An Englishman lives longer to-day than he did in 1800, and longer yet than in 1700. Here is a curious proof. Annuities calculated on a certain rate of life in 1694 would yield a fortune to those who issued them. Calculated at the same rate in 1794, they would ruin them; for the more general diffusion of knowledge and refinement had added, I am not able to say how many years to the average British life. Observe how this statement is confirmed by some wonderful statistics preserved at Geneva. From 1600 to 1700 the average length of life in that city was 13 years 3 months. From 1700 to 1750 it was 27 years 9 months. From 1750 to 1800, 31 years 3 months. From 1800 to 1833, 43 years 6 months.
One more pertinent fact. Take in England any number of families you please, whose parents can read and write, and an equal number of families whose parents cannot read and write, and the number of children in the latter class of families who will die before the age of five years will greatly exceed that in the former class,—some thirty or forty per cent. So surely does a thoughtful ordering of life come in the train of intelligence. If faith is to be placed in statistics of any sort, then it holds true in foreign countries that human life is long in proportion to the degree that knowledge, refinement, and virtue are diffused. That is, sainthood, so far from destroying the body, preserves it.
I anticipate the objection which may be made to our last argument. Abroad, we are told, there is such an element of healthy, out-door life, that any ill effects which might naturally follow in the train of general education are neutralized. Abroad, too, education with the masses is elementary, and advanced also with more moderation than with us. Abroad, moreover, the whole social being is not pervaded with the intense intellectual activity and fervor which are so characteristic especially of New England life.
Come home, then, to our own Massachusetts, which some will have is school-mad. What do you find? Here, in a climate proverbially changeable and rigorous,—here, where mental and moral excitements rise to fever-heat,—here, where churches adorn every landscape, and school-houses greet us at every corner, and lyceums are established in every village,—here, where newspapers circulate by the hundred thousand, and magazines for our old folks, and "Our Young Folks," too, reach fifty thousand,—here, in Massachusetts, health is at its climax: greater and more enduring than in bonnie England, or vine-clad France, or sunny Italy. I read some statistics the other day, and I have ever since had a greater respect for the land of "east-winds, and salt-fish and school-houses," as scandalous people have termed Massachusetts. What do these statistics say? That, while in England the deaths reach annually 2.21 per cent of the whole population, and in France 2.36 per cent, and in Italy 2.94 per cent, and in Austria 3.34 per cent, in Massachusetts, the deaths are only 1.82 per cent annually. Even in Boston, with its large proportion of foreign elements, the percentage of deaths is only 2.35. It may be said, in criticism of these statements, that in our country statistics are not kept with sufficient accuracy to furnish correct data. However this may be in our rural districts, it certainly is not true of the metropolis. The figures are not at hand, but they exist, and they prove conclusively that those wards in Boston which have a population most purely native reach a salubrity unexcelled. So that, with all the real drawbacks of climate, and the pretended drawbacks of unnatural or excessive mental stimulus, the health here is absolutely unequalled by that of any country in Europe. Certainly, if the mental and moral sainthood which we have does not build up the body, it cannot be said that it does any injury to it.
Have we noted what a splendid testimony the war which has just closed has