Health and Education

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Health and Education

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Kingsley
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Title: Health and Education
Author: Charles Kingsley

Release Date: December 31, 2005 [eBook #17437]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEALTH
AND EDUCATION***

Transcribed from the 1874 W. Isbister & Co. edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

HEALTH AND EDUCATION
BY THE REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY, F.L.S., F.G.S. CANON OF
WESTMINSTER
W. ISBISTER & CO. 56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON 1874
[_All rights reserved_]

THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH
Whether the British race is improving or degenerating? What, if it seem
probably degenerating, are the causes of so great an evil? How they can
be, if not destroyed, at least arrested?--These are questions worthy the
attention, not of statesmen only and medical men, but of every father
and mother in these isles. I shall say somewhat about them in this Essay;
and say it in a form which ought to be intelligible to fathers and
mothers of every class, from the highest to the lowest, in hopes of
convincing some of them at least that the science of health, now so
utterly neglected in our curriculum of so-called education, ought to be
taught--the rudiments of it at least--in every school, college, and
university.
We talk of our hardy forefathers; and rightly. But they were hardy, just
as the savage is usually hardy, because none but the hardy lived. They
may have been able to say of themselves--as they do in a state paper of
1515, now well known through the pages of Mr. Froude--"What comyn
folk of all the world may compare with the comyns of England, in
riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folk
is so mighty, and so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?"
They may have been fed on "great shins of beef," till they became, as
Benvenuto Cellini calls them, "the English wild beasts." But they
increased in numbers slowly, if at all, for centuries. Those terrible laws
of natural selection, which issue in "the survival of the fittest," cleared
off the less fit, in every generation, principally by infantile disease,

often by wholesale famine and pestilence; and left, on the whole, only
those of the strongest constitutions to perpetuate a hardy, valiant, and
enterprising race.
At last came a sudden and unprecedented change. In the first years of
the century, steam and commerce produced an enormous increase in the
population. Millions of fresh human beings found employment, married,
brought up children who found employment in their turn, and learnt to
live more or less civilised lives. An event, doubtless, for which God is
to be thanked. A quite new phase of humanity, bringing with it new
vices and new dangers: but bringing, also, not merely new comforts,
but new noblenesses, new generosities, new conceptions of duty, and of
how that duty should be done. It is childish to regret the old times,
when our soot-grimed manufacturing districts were green with lonely
farms. To murmur at the transformation would be, I believe, to murmur
at the will of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground.
"The old order changeth, yielding place to the new, And God fulfils
himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the
world."
Our duty is, instead of longing for the good old custom, to take care of
the good new custom, lest it should corrupt the world in like wise. And
it may do so thus:--
The rapid increase of population during the first half of this century
began at a moment when the British stock was specially exhausted;
namely, about the end of the long French war. There may have been
periods of exhaustion, at least in England, before that. There may have
been one here, as there seems to have been on the Continent, after the
Crusades; and another after the Wars of the Roses. There was certainly
a period of severe exhaustion at the end of Elizabeth's reign, due both
to the long Spanish and Irish wars and to the terrible endemics
introduced from abroad; an exhaustion which may have caused, in part,
the national weakness which hung upon us during the reign of the
Stuarts. But after none of these did the survival of the less fit suddenly
become more easy; or the discovery of steam power, and the
acquisition of a colonial empire, create at once a