The Atlantic Monthly | Page 3

nought but good to its servant the body?
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After all, we cannot evade, and we ought not to seek to evade, the testimony of facts. No cause can properly stand on any theory, however pleasant and cheering, or however plausible. What, then, of the facts, of the painful facts of experience, which are said to tell so different a tale? This,--that the physical value of education is in no way so clearly demonstrated as by these very facts. We know what is the traditional picture of the scholar,--pale, stooping, hectic, hurrying with unsteady feet to a predestined early grave; or else morbid, dyspeptic, cadaverous, putting into his works the dark tints of his own inward nature. At best, he is painted as a mere bookworm, bleached and almost mildewed in some learned retirement beneath the shadow of great folios, until he is out of joint with the world, and all fresh and hearty life has gone out of him. Who cannot recall just such pictures, wherein one knows not which predominates, the ludicrous or the pitiful? We protest against them all. In the name of truth and common-sense alike, we indignantly reject them. We have a vision of a sturdier manhood: of the genial, open countenance of an Irving; of the homely, honest strength 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