The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
results of our New England villages and put into the ranks of our army—young men who learned the alphabet at four, who all through boyhood had the advantages of our common-school system, who had felt to the full the excitement of the intellectual life about them—have stood taller, weighed heavier, fought more bravely and intelligently, won victory out of more adverse circumstances, and, what is more to the point, endured more hardship with less sickness, than a like number of any other race on earth. We care not where you look for comparison, whether to Britain, or to France, or to Russia, where the spelling-book has almost been tabooed, or to Spain, where in times past the capacity to read the Bible was scarcely less than rank heresy, at least for the common people. This war has been brought to a successful issue by the best educated army that ever fought on battle-field, or, as the new book has it, by "the thinking bayonet," by men whose physical manhood has received no detriment from their intellectual culture.
These assertions are founded upon statistics which have been preserved regiments whose members were almost exclusively native-born. And the results are certainly in accordance with all candid observation. It may, indeed, be said that the better health of our army has been after all the result of the better care which the soldier has taken of himself. We answer, the better care was the product of his education. It may be said again that this health was owing in a great measure to the superior watchfulness exercised over the soldier by others, by the Government, by the Sanitary Commission, and by State agencies. Then we reply, that this tenderness of the soldier, if tenderness it be, and this sagacity, if sagacity prompted the care, were both the offspring of that high intelligence which is the proper result of popular education.
There is but one possible mode of escape from such testimony. This whole train of argument is inconclusive, it may be asserted, because what is maintained is not that intellectual culture is unhealthful, where it is woven into the web of active life, but only where the pursuit of knowledge is one's business. It may be readily allowed, that, where the whole nature is kept alive by the breath of outward enterprise, when the great waves of this world's excitements are permitted to roll with purifying tides into the inmost recesses of the soul, the results of mental culture may be modified. But what of the saints? What of the literary men par excellence?
Ah! if you restrain us to that line of inquiry, the argument will be trebly strong, and the facts grow overwhelmingly pertinent and conclusive. Will you examine the careful registry of deaths in Massachusetts which has been kept the last twenty years? It will inform you that the classes whose average of life is high up, almost the highest up, are with us the classes that work with the brain,—the judges, the lawyers, the physicians, the clergymen, the professors in your colleges. The very exception to this statement rather confirms than contradicts our general position, that intellectual culture is absolutely invigorating. The cultivators of the soil live longest. But note that it is the educated, intelligent farmers, the farmers of Massachusetts, the farmers of a State of common schools, the farmers who link thought to labor, who live long. And doubtless, if they carried more thought into their labor, if they were more intelligent, if they were better educated, they would live yet longer. At any rate, in England the cultivators of her soil, her down-trodden peasantry, sluggish and uneducated, do not live out half their days. Very likely the farmer's lot, plus education and plus habits of mental activity, is the healthiest as it is the primal condition of man. Nevertheless, considering what is the general opinion, it is surprising how slight is the advantage which he has even then over the purely literary classes.
Will you go to Harvard University and ascertain what becomes of her children? Take up, then, Dr. Palmer's Necrology of the Alumni of Harvard from 1851 to 1863. You will learn, that, while the average age of all persons who in Massachusetts die after they have attained the period of twenty years is but fifty years, the average age of Harvard graduates, who die in like manner, is fifty-eight years. Thus you have, in favor of the highest form of public education known in the State, a clear average of eight years. You may examine backward the Triennial Catalogue as far as you please, and you will not find the testimony essentially different. The statement will stand impregnable, that, from the time John Harvard founded our little College in the wilderness, to this hour, when it is fast becoming a great University, with its schools in every department, and its lectures covering the whole field of human knowledge, the graduates have always attained a longevity surpassing that of their generation.
And you are to observe that this comparison is a strictly just comparison. We contrast not the whole community, old and young, with those who must necessarily have attained manhood before they are a class at all; but adults with adults, graduates with those of other avocations who have arrived at the period of twenty years. Neither do we compare the bright and peculiar luminaries of Harvard with the mass of men,—though, in fact, it is well known that the best scholars live the most years,—but we compare the whole body of the graduates, bright and dull, studious and unstudious, with the whole body of the community.
To the array of evidence which may be brought from all the registries of all the states and universities under heaven, some may triumphantly exclaim, "Statistics are unworthy of trust." "To lie like statistics," "false as a fact," these are the stalest of witticisms. But the objection to which they give point is practically frivolous. Grant that statistics are to a certain degree doubtful, are they not the most trustworthy evidence we have? And in the question at issue, are they not the only evidence which has real force? And allowing their general defectiveness, how shall we explain, that, though gathered from all sides and by all kinds of people, they so uniformly favor education? Why, if they must err, do they err so pertinaciously in one direction? How does it happen, that, summon as many witnesses as you please, and cross-question them as severely as you can, they never falter in this testimony, that, where intelligence abounds, there physical vigor does much more abound? that, where education is broad and generous, there the years are many and happy?
If, therefore, facts can prove anything, it is that just such a condition of life as that which is growing more and more general among us, and which our common-school system directly fosters, where every man is becoming an educated man,—where the farmer upon his acres, the merchant at his desk, and the mechanic in his shop, no less than the scholar poring over his books shall be in the truest sense educated,—that such a condition is the one of all others which promotes habits of thought and action, an elasticity of temper and a breadth of vision and interest most conducive to health and vigor. It is the fashion to talk of the appearance of superior robustness so characteristic of our English brethren. But we suspect that in this case, too, appearances are deceitful. That climate may produce in us a restless energy inconsistent with rounded forms and rosy cheeks we freely allow. But in strength and real endurance the New England constitution will yield to none. And the stern logic of facts shows beyond a peradventure, that here there are no influences, climatic or intellectual, which war with longevity. What may be hidden in the future, what results may come from a still wider diffusion of education, we cannot tell, but hitherto nothing but good has come of ever-increasing knowledge.
We hasten now to inquire concerning the health and years of special classes of literary men: not, indeed, to prove that there is no real war between the mind and the body,—for we consider that point to be already demonstrated,—but rather to show that we need shrink from no field of inquiry, and that from every fresh field will come new evidence of the substantial truth of our position.
We have taken the trouble to ascertain the average age of all the English poets of whom Johnson wrote lives, some fifty or sixty in all. Here are great men and small men, men with immortal names and men whose names were long since forgotten, men of good habits and men whose habits would undermine any constitution, flourishing, too, in a period when human life was certainly far shorter in England than now. And how long did they live? What do you think? Thirty, forty years? No; they endured their sainthood, or their want of it, for the comfortable period of fifty-six years. Nor is the case a particle different, if you take only the great and memorable names of English poetry. Chaucer, living at the dawn almost of English civilization; Shakspeare, whose varied and marvellous dramas might well have exhausted any vitality; Milton, struggling with domestic infelicity, with political hatred, and with blindness; Dryden, Pope, Swift: none of these burning and shining lights of English literature went out at mid-day. The result is not altered, if you come nearer our own time. That galaxy of talent and genius which shone with such brilliancy in the Scottish capital at the beginning