Etext » books

I understand, agree to and accept the "Small Print!" statement.

Project Gutenberg Etext Sanitary and Social Lectures by Kingsley

#7 in our series by Charles Kingsley

the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!

Please take a look at the important information in this header.

We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an

electronic path open for the next readers. Do not remove this.

**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*

Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and

further information is included below. We need your donations.

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

by Charles Kingsley

February, 1999 [Etext #1637]

Project Gutenberg Etext Sanitary and Social Lectures by Kingsley

******This file should be named sasle10.txt or sasle10.zip******

Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, sasle11.txt

VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, sasle10a.txt

This etext was prepared from the 1880 Macmillan and Co. edition

by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,

all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a

in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise.

We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance

of the official release dates, for time for better editing.

Please note: neither this list nor its contents are final till

midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.

The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at

Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month. A

preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment

and editing by those who wish to do so. To be sure you have an

up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes

in the first week of the next month. Since our ftp program has

a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a

look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a

new copy has at least one byte more or less.

Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The

fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take

to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright

searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. This

projected audience is one hundred million readers. If our value

per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2

million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text

files per month, or 384 more Etexts in 1998 for a total of 1500+

If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the

total should reach over 150 billion Etexts given away.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext

Files by the December 31, 2001. [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]

This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,

which is only 10% of the present number of computer users. 2001

should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it

will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.

We need your donations more than ever!

All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are

tax deductible to the extent allowable by law. (CMU = Carnegie-

Mellon University).

For these and other matters, please mail to:

Project Gutenberg

P. O. Box 2782

Champaign, IL 61825

When all other email fails try our Executive Director:

Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>

We would prefer to send you this information by email

(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).

If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please

FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:

[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]

ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu

password: your@login

cd etext/etext90 through /etext96

or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]

dir [to see files]

get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]

GET INDEX?00.GUT

for a list of books

and

GET NEW GUT for general information

and

MGET GUT* for newsletters.

**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**

(Three Pages)

***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***

Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.

They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with

your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from

someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our

fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement

disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how

you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT

By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm

etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept

this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive

a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by

sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person

you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical

medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS

This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-

tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor

Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at

Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project"). Among other

things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright

on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and

distribute it in the United States without permission and

without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth

below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext

under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable

efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain

works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any

medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other

things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or

corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other

intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged

disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer

codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES

But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,

[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this

etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all

liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including

legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR

UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,

INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE

OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE

POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of

receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)

you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that

time to the person you received it from. If you received it

on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and

such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement

copy. If you received it electronically, such person may

choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to

receive it electronically.

THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER

WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS

TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT

LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A

PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or

the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the

above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you

may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY

You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,

officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost

and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or

indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:

[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,

or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"

You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by

disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this

"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,

or:

[1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this

requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the

etext or this "small print!" statement. You may however,

if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable

binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,

including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-

cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as

*EITHER*:

[*] The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and

does *not* contain characters other than those

intended by the author of the work, although tilde

(~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may

be used to convey punctuation intended by the

author, and additional characters may be used to

indicate hypertext links; OR

[*] The etext may be readily converted by the reader at

no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent

form by the program that displays the etext (as is

the case, for instance, with most word processors);

[*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at

no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the

etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC

or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this

"Small Print!" statement.

[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the

net profits you derive calculated using the method you

already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you

don't derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are

payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon

University" within the 60 days following each

date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)

your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?

The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,

scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty

free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution

you can think of. Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg

Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".

*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

This etext was prepared from the 1880 Macmillan and Co. edition

by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

Contents:

Woman's Work in a Country Parish

The Science of Health

The Two Breaths

Thrift

Nausicaa in London; or, the Lower Education of Women

The Air-Mothers

The Tree of Knowledge

Great Cities and their Influence for Good and Evil

Heroism

The Massacre of the Innocents

"A mad world, my masters."

WOMAN'S WORK IN A COUNTRY PARISH {1}

I have been asked to speak a few words to you on a lady's work in

a country parish. I shall confine myself rather to principles

than to details; and the first principle which I would impress on

you is, that we must all be just before we are generous. I must,

indeed, speak plainly on this point. A woman's first duties are

to her own family, her own servants. Be not deceived: if anyone

cannot rule her own household, she cannot rule the Church of God.

If anyone cannot sympathise with the servants with whom she is in

contact all day long, she will not really sympathise with the poor

whom she sees once a week. I know the temptation not to believe

this is very great. It seems so much easier to women to do

something for the poor, than for their own ladies' maids, and

house-maids, and cooks. And why? Because they can treat the poor

as THINGS: but they MUST treat their servants as persons. A lady

can go into a poor cottage, lay down the law to the inhabitants,

reprove them for sins to which she has never been tempted; tell

them how to set things right, which, if she had the doing of them,

I fear she would do even more confusedly and slovenly than they.

She can give them a tract, as she might a pill; and then a

shilling, as something sweet after the medicine; and she can go

out again and see no more of them till her benevolent mood recurs:

but with the servants it is not so. She knows their characters;

and, what is more, they know hers; they know her private history,

her little weaknesses. Perhaps she is a little in their power,

and she is shy with them. She is afraid of beginning a good work

with them, because, if she does, she will be forced to carry it

out; and it cannot be cold, dry, perfunctory, official: it must

be hearty, living, loving, personal. She must make them her

friends; and perhaps she is afraid of doing that, for fear they

should take liberties, as it is called--which they very probably

will do, unless she keeps up a very high standard of self-

restraint and earnestness in her own life--and that involves a

great deal of trouble, and so she is tempted, when she wishes to

do good, to fall back on the poor people in the cottages outside,

who, as she fancies, know nothing about her, and will never find

out whether or not she acts up to the rules which she lays down

for them. Be not deceived, I say, in this case also. Fancy not

that they know nothing about you. There is nothing secret which

shall not be made manifest; and what you do in the closet is

surely proclaimed (and often with exaggeration enough and to

spare) on the house-top. These poor folks at your gate know well

enough, through servants and tradesmen, what you are, how you

treat your servants, how you pay your bills, what sort of temper

you have; and they form a shrewd, hard estimate of your character,

in the light of which they view all that you do and say to them;

and believe me, that if you wish to do any real good to them, you

must begin by doing good to those who lie still nearer to you than

them. And believe me, too, that if you shrink from a hearty

patriarchal sympathy with your own servants, because it would

require too much personal human intercourse with them, you are

like a man who, finding that he had not powder enough to fire off

a pocket-pistol, should try to better matters by using the same

quantity of ammunition in an eighty-four pound gun. For it is

this human friendship, trust, affection, which is the very thing

you have to employ towards the poor, and to call up in them.

Clubs, societies, alms, lending libraries are but dead machinery,

needful, perhaps, but, like the iron tube without the powder,

unable to send the bullet forth one single inch; dead and useless

lumber, without humanity; without the smile of the lip, the light

of the eye, the tenderness of the voice, which makes the poor

woman feel that a soul is speaking to her soul, a heart yearning

after her heart; that she is not merely a THING to be improved,

but a sister to be made conscious of the divine bond of her

sisterhood, and taught what she means when she repeats in her

Creed, "I believe in the communion of saints." This is my text,

and my key-note--whatever else I may say to-day is but a carrying

out into details of the one question, How may you go to these poor

creatures as woman to woman?

Your next duties are to your husband's or father's servants and

workmen. It is said that a clergyman's wife ought to consider the

parish as HER flock as well as her husband's. It may be so: I

believe the dogma to be much overstated just now. But of a

landlord's, or employer's wife (I am inclined to say, too, of an

officer's wife), such a doctrine is absolutely true, and cannot be

overstated. A large proportion, therefore, of your parish work

will be to influence the men of your family to do their duty by

their dependants. You wish to cure the evils under which they

labour. The greater proportion of these are in the hands of your

men relatives. It is a mockery, for instance, in you to visit the

fever-stricken cottage, while your husband leaves it in a state

which breeds that fever. Your business is to go to him and say,

"HERE IS A WRONG; RIGHT IT!" This, as many a beautiful Middle Age

legend tells us, has been woman's function in all uncivilised

times; not merely to melt man's heart to pity, but to awaken it to

duty. But the man must see that the woman is in earnest: that if

he will not repair the wrong by justice, she will, if possible (as

in those old legends), by self-sacrifice. Be sure this method

will conquer. Do but say: "If you will not new-roof that

cottage, if you will not make that drain, I will. I will not buy

a new dress till it is done; I will sell the horse you gave me,

pawn the bracelet you gave me, but the thing shall be done." Let

him see, I say, that you are in earnest, and he will feel that

your message is a divine one, which he must obey for very shame

and weariness, if for nothing else. This is in my eyes the second

part of a woman's parish work. I entreat you to bear it in mind

when you hear, as I trust you will, lectures in this place upon

that SANITARY REFORM, without which all efforts for the bettering

of the masses are in my eyes not only useless, but hypocritical.

I will suppose, then, that you are fulfilling home duties in self-

restraint, and love, and in the fear of God. I will suppose that

you are using all your woman's influence on the mind of your

family, in behalf of tenants and workmen; and I tell you frankly,

that unless this be first done, you are paying a tithe of mint and

anise, and neglecting common righteousness and mercy. But you

wish to do more: you wish for personal contact with the poor

round you, for the pure enjoyment of doing good to them with your

own hands. How are you to set about it? First, there are clubs--

clothing-clubs, shoe-clubs, maternal-clubs; all very good in their

way. But do not fancy that they are the greater part of your

parish work. Rather watch and fear lest they become substitutes

for your real parish work; lest the bustle and amusement of

playing at shopkeeper, or penny-collector, once a week, should

blind you to your real power--your real treasure, by spending

which you become all the richer. What you have to do is to

ennoble and purify the WOMANHOOD of these poor women; to make them

better daughters, sisters, wives, mothers: and all the clubs in

the world will not do that; they are but palliatives of a great

evil, which they do not touch; cloaks for almsgiving, clumsy means

of eking out insufficient wages; at best, kindly contrivances for

tricking into temporary thriftiness a degraded and reckless

peasantry. Miserable, miserable state of things! out of which the

longer I live I see less hope of escape, saving by an emigration,

which shall drain us of all the healthy, strong, and brave among

the lower classes, and leave us, as a just punishment for our

sins, only the cripple, the drunkard, and the beggar.

Yet these clubs MUST be carried on. They make life a little more

possible; they lighten hearts, if but for a moment; they inculcate

habits of order and self-restraint, which may be useful when the

poor man finds himself in Canada or Australia. And it is a cruel

utilitarianism to refuse to palliate the symptoms because you

cannot cure the disease itself. You will give opiates to the

suffering, who must die nevertheless. Let him slip into his grave

at least as painlessly as you can. And so you must use these

charitable societies, remembering all along what a fearful and

humbling sign the necessity for them is of the diseased state of

this England, as the sportula and universal almsgiving was of the

decadence of Rome.

However, the work has to be done; and such as it is, it is

especially fitted for young unmarried ladies. It requires no deep

knowledge of human nature. It makes them aware of the amount of

suffering and struggling which lies around them, without bringing

them in that most undesirable contact with the coarser forms of

evil which house-visitation must do; and the mere business habits

of accuracy and patience to which it compels them, are a valuable

practical schooling for them themselves in after-life. It is

tiresome and unsentimental drudgery, no doubt; but perhaps all the

better training on that account. And, after all, the magic of

sweetness, grace, and courtesy may shed a hallowing and humanising

light over the meanest work, and the smile of God may spread from

lip to lip, and the light of God from eye to eye, even between the

giver and receiver of a penny, till the poor woman goes home,

saying in her heart, "I have not only found the life of my hand--I

have found a sister for time and for eternity."

But there is another field of parish usefulness which I cannot

recommend too earnestly, and that is, the school. There you may

work as hard as you will, and how you will--provided you do it in

a loving, hearty, cheerful, HUMAN way, playful and yet earnest;

two qualities which, when they exist in their highest power, are

sure to go together. I say, how you will. I am no pedant about

schools; I care less what is taught than how it is taught. The

merest rudiments of Christianity, the merest rudiments of popular

instruction, are enough, provided they be given by lips which

speak as if they believed what they said, and with a look which

shows real love for the pupil. Manner is everything--matter a

secondary consideration; for in matter, brain only speaks to

brain; in manner, soul speaks to soul. If you want Christ's lost-

lambs really to believe that He died for them, you will do it

better by one little act of interest and affection, than by making

them learn by heart whole commentaries--even as Miss Nightingale

has preached Christ crucified to those poor soldiers by acts of

plain outward drudgery, more livingly, and really, and

convincingly than she could have done by ten thousand sermons, and

made many a noble lad, I doubt not, say in his heart, for the

first time in his wild life, "I can believe now that Christ died

for me, for here is one whom He has taught to die for me in like

wise." And this blessed effect of school-work, remember, is not

confined to the children. It goes home with them to the parents.

The child becomes an object of interest and respect in their eyes,

when they see it an object of interest and respect in yours. If

they see that you look on it as an awful and glorious being, the

child of God, the co-heir of Christ, they learn gradually to look

on it in the same light. They become afraid and ashamed (and it

is a noble fear and shame) to do and say before it what they used

to do and say; afraid to ill-use it. It becomes to them a

mysterious visitor (sad that it should be so, but true as sad)

from a higher and purer sphere, who must be treated with something

of courtesy and respect, who must even be asked to teach them

something of its new knowledge; and the school, and the ladies'

interest in the school, become to the degraded parents a living

sign that those children's angels do indeed behold the face of

their Father which is in heaven.

Now, there is one thing in school-work which I wish to press on

you; and that is, that you should not confine your work to the

girls; but bestow it as freely on those who need it more, and who

(paradoxical as it may seem) will respond to it more deeply and

freely--THE BOYS. I am not going to enter into the reasons WHY.

I only entreat you to believe me, that by helping to educate the

boys, or even (when old enough), by taking a class (as I have seen

done with admirable effect) of grown-up lads, you may influence

for ever not only the happiness of your pupils, but of the girls

whom they will hereafter marry. It will be a boon to your own sex

as well as to ours to teach them courtesy, self-restraint,

reverence for physical weakness, admiration of tenderness and

gentleness; and it is one which only a lady can bestow. Only by

being accustomed in youth to converse with ladies, will the boy

learn to treat hereafter his sweetheart or his wife like a

gentleman. There is a latent chivalry, doubt it not, in the heart

of every untutored clod; if it dies out in him (as it too often

does), it were better for him, I often think, if he had never been

born: but the only talisman which will keep it alive, much more

develop it into its fulness, is friendly and revering intercourse

with women of higher rank than himself, between whom and him there

is a great and yet a blessed gulf fixed.

I have left to the last the most important subject of all; and

that is, what is called "visiting the poor." It is an endless

subject; if you go into details, you might write volumes on it.

All I can do this afternoon is to keep to my own key-note, and

say, Visit whom, when, and where you will; but let your visits be

those of woman to woman. Consider to whom you go--to poor souls

whose life, compared with yours, is one long malaise of body, and

soul, and spirit--and do as you would be done by; instead of

reproving and fault-finding, encourage. In God's name, encourage.

They scramble through life's rocks, bogs, and thornbrakes,

clumsily enough, and have many a fall, poor things! But why, in

the name of a God of love and justice, is the lady, rolling along

the smooth turnpike-road in her comfortable carriage, to be

calling out all day long to the poor soul who drags on beside her

over hedge and ditch, moss and moor, bare-footed and weary-

hearted, with half-a-dozen children at her back: "You ought not

to have fallen here; and it was very cowardly to lie down there;

and it was your duty, as a mother, to have helped that child

through the puddle; while, as for sleeping under that bush, it is

most imprudent and inadmissible?" Why not encourage her, praise

her, cheer her on her weary way by loving words, and keep your

reproofs for yourself--even your advice; for SHE does get on her

way, after all, where YOU could not travel a step forward; and she

knows what she is about perhaps better than you do, and what she

has to endure, and what God thinks of her life-journey. The heart

knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not with

its joy. But do not be a stranger to her. Be a sister to her. I

do not ask you to take her up in your carriage. You cannot;

perhaps it is good for her that you cannot. It is good sometimes

for Lazarus that he is not fit to sit at Dives's feast--good for

him that he should receive his evil things in this life, and be

comforted in the life to come. All I ask is, do to the poor soul

as you would have her do to you in her place. Do not interrupt

and vex her (for she is busy enough already) with remedies which

she does not understand, for troubles which you do not understand.

But speak comfortably to her, and say: "I cannot feel WITH you,

but I do feel FOR you: I should enjoy helping you, but I do not

know how--tell me. Tell me where the yoke galls; tell me why that

forehead is grown old before its time: I may be able to ease the

burden, to put fresh light into the eyes; and if not, still tell

me, simply because I am a woman, and know the relief of pouring

out my own soul into loving ears, even though in the depths of

despair." Yes, paradoxical as it may seem, I am convinced that

the only way to help these poor women humanly and really, is to

begin by confessing to them that you do not know how to help them;

to humble yourself to them, and to ask their counsel for the good

of themselves and of their neighbours, instead of coming proudly

to them, with nostrums ready compounded, as if a doctor should be

so confident in his own knowledge of books and medicine as to give

physic before asking the patient's symptoms.

Therefore, I entreat you to bear in mind (for without this all

visiting of the poor will be utterly void and useless), that you

must regulate your conduct to them, and in their houses, even to

the most minute particulars, by the very same rules which apply to

persons of your own class. Never let any woman say of you

(thought fatal to all confidence, all influence!): "Yes, it is

all very kind: but she does not behave to me as she would to one

of her own quality." Piety, earnestness, affectionateness,

eloquence--all may be nullified and stultified by simply keeping a

poor woman standing in her own cottage while you sit, or entering

her house, even at her own request, while she is at meals. She

may decline to sit; she may beg you to come in, all the more

reason for refusing utterly to obey her, because it shows that

that very inward gulf between you and her still exists in her

mind, which it is the object of your visit to bridge over. If you

know her to be in trouble, touch on that trouble as you would with

a lady. Woman's heart is alike in all ranks, and the deepest

sorrow is the one of which she speaks the last and least. We

should not like anyone--no, not an angel from heaven, to come into

our houses without knocking at the door, and say: "I hear you are

very ill off--I will lend you a hundred pounds. I think you are

very careless of money, I will take your accounts into my own

hands;" and still less again: "Your son is a very bad,

profligate, disgraceful fellow, who is not fit to be mentioned; I

intend to take him out of your hands and reform him myself."

Neither do the poor like such unceremonious mercy, such untender

tenderness, benevolence at horse-play, mistaking kicks for

caresses. They do not like it, they will not respond to it, save

in parishes which have been demoralised by officious and

indiscriminate benevolence, and where the last remaining virtues

of the poor, savage self-help and independence, have been

exchanged (as I have too often seen them exchanged) for organised

begging and hypocrisy.

I would that you would all read, ladies, and consider well the

traits of an opposite character which have just come to light (to

me, I am ashamed to say, for the first time) in the Biography of

Sidney Smith. The love and admiration which that truly brave and

loving man won from everyone, rich or poor, with whom he came in

contact, seems to me to have arisen from the one fact, that

without perhaps having any such conscious intention, he treated

rich and poor, his own servants and the noblemen his guests,

alike, and ALIKE courteously, considerately, cheerfully,

affectionately--so leaving a blessing and reaping a blessing

wheresoever he went.

Approach, then, these poor women as sisters, and you will be able

gradually to reverse the hard saying of which I made use just now:

"Do not apply remedies which they do not understand, to diseases

which you do not understand." Learn lovingly and patiently (aye,

and reverently, for there is that in every human being which

deserves reverence, and must be reverenced if we wish to

understand it)--learn, I say, to understand their troubles, and by

that time they will have learnt to understand your remedies, and

they will appreciate them. For you HAVE remedies. I do not

undervalue your position. No man on earth is less inclined to

undervalue the real power of wealth, rank, accomplishments,

manners--even physical beauty. All are talents from God, and I

give God thanks when I see them possessed by any human being; for

I know that they, too, can be used in His service, and brought to

bear on the true emancipation of woman--her emancipation, not from

man (as some foolish persons fancy), but from the devil, "the

slanderer and divider" who divides her from man, and makes her

live a life-long tragedy, which goes on in more cottages than in

palaces--a vie e part, a vie incomprise--a life made up half of

ill-usage, half of unnecessary, self-willed, self-conceited

martyrdom, instead of being (as God intended) half of the human

universe, a helpmeet for man, and the one bright spot which makes

this world endurable. Towards making her that, and so realising

the primeval mission by every cottage hearth, each of you can do

something; for each of you have some talent, power, knowledge,

attraction between soul and soul, which the cottager's wife has

not, and by which you may draw her to you with (as the prophet

says) human bonds and the cords of love: but she must be drawn by

them alone, or your work is nothing, and though you give the

treasures of Ind, they are valueless equally to her and to Christ;

for they are not given in His name, which is that boundless

tenderness, consideration, patience, self-sacrifice, by which even

the cup of cold water is a precious offering--as God grant your

labour may be!

THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH {2}

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 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 this 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 fresh demand for human beings

and a fresh supply of food for them. Britain, at the beginning of

the nineteenth century, was in an altogether new social situation,

At the beginning of the great French war; and, indeed, ever since

the beginning of the war with Spain in 1739--often snubbed as the

"war about Jenkins's ear"--but which was, as I hold, one of the

most just, as it was one of the most popular, of all our wars;

after, too, the once famous "forty fine harvests" of the

eighteenth century, the British people, from the gentleman who led

to the soldier or sailor who followed, were one of the mightiest

and most capable races which the world has ever seen, comparable

best to the old Roman, at his mightiest and most capable period.

That, at least, their works testify. They created--as far as man

can be said to create anything--the British Empire. They won for

us our colonies, our commerce, the mastery of the seas of all the

world. But at what a cost!

Their bones are scattered far and wide,

By mount, and stream, and sea.

Year after year, till the final triumph of Waterloo, not battle

only, but worse destroyers than shot and shell--fatigue and

disease--had been carrying off our stoutest, ablest, healthiest

young men, each of whom represented, alas! a maiden left unmarried

at home, or married, in default, to a less able man. The

strongest went to the war; each who fell left a weaklier man to

continue the race; while of those who did not fall, too many

returned with tainted and weakened constitutions, to injure, it

may be, generations yet unborn. The middle classes, being mostly

engaged in peaceful pursuits, suffered less of this decimation of

their finest young men; and to that fact I attribute much of their

increasing preponderance, social, political, and intellectual, to

this very day. One cannot walk the streets of any of our great

commercial cities without seeing plenty of men, young and middle-

aged, whose whole bearing and stature shows that the manly vigour

of our middle class is anything but exhausted. In Liverpool,

especially, I have been much struck not only with the vigorous

countenance, but with the bodily size of the mercantile men on

'Change. But it must be remembered always, first, that these men

are the very elite of their class; the cleverest men; the men

capable of doing most work; and next, that they are, almost all of

them, from the great merchant who has his villa out of town, and

perhaps his moor in the Highlands, down to the sturdy young

volunteer who serves in the haberdasher's shop, country-bred men;

and that the question is, not what they are like now, but what

their children and grandchildren, especially the fine young

volunteer's, will be like? A very serious question I hold that to

be, and for this reason.

War is, without doubt, the most hideous physical curse which

fallen man inflicts upon himself; and for this simple reason, that

it reverses the very laws of nature, and is more cruel even than

pestilence. For instead of issuing in the survival of the

fittest, it issues in the survival of the less fit: and

therefore, if protracted, must deteriorate generations yet unborn.

And yet a peace such as we now enjoy, prosperous, civilised,

humane, is fraught, though to a less degree, with the very same

ill effect.

In the first place, tens of thousands--who knows it not?--lead

sedentary and unwholesome lives, stooping, asphyxiated, employing

as small a fraction of their bodies as of their minds. And all

this in dwellings, workshops, what not?--the influences, the very

atmosphere of which tend not to health, but to unhealth, and to

drunkenness as a solace under the feeling of unhealth and

depression. And that such a life must tell upon their offspring,

and if their offspring grow up under similar circumstances, upon

their offspring's offspring, till a whole population may become

permanently degraded, who does not know? For who that walks

through the by-streets of any great city does not see? Moreover,

and this is one of the most fearful problems with which modern

civilisation has to deal--we interfere with natural selection by

our conscientious care of life, as surely as does war itself. If

war kills the most fit to live, we save alive those who--looking

at them from a merely physical point of view--are most fit to die.

Everything which makes it more easy to live; every sanitary

reform, prevention of pestilence, medical discovery, amelioration

of climate, drainage of soil, improvement in dwelling-houses,

workhouses, gaols; every reformatory school, every hospital, every

cure of drunkenness, every influence, in short, which has--so I am

told--increased the average length of life in these islands, by

nearly one-third, since the first establishment of life

insurances, one hundred and fifty years ago; every influence of

this kind, I say, saves persons alive who would otherwise have

died; and the great majority of these will be, even in surgical

and zymotic cases, those of least resisting power, who are thus

preserved to produce in time a still less powerful progeny.

Do I say that we ought not to save these people if we can? God

forbid. The weakly, the diseased whether infant or adult, is here

on earth; a British citizen; no more responsible for his own

weakness than for his own existence. Society, that is, in plain

English, we and our ancestors, are responsible for both; and we

must fulfil the duty, and keep him in life; and, if we can, heal,

strengthen, develop him to the utmost; and make the best of that

which "fate and our own deservings" have given us to deal with. I

do not speak of higher motives still; motives which, to every

minister of religion, must be paramount and awful. I speak merely

of physical and social motives, such as appeal to the conscience

of every man--the instinct which bids every human-hearted man or

woman to save life, alleviate pain, like Him who causes His sun to

shine on the evil and on the good, and His rain to fall on the

just and on the unjust.

But it is palpable that in doing so we must, year by year,

preserve a large percentage of weakly persons who, marrying freely

in their own class, must produce weaklier children, and they

weaklier children still. Must, did I say? There are those who

are of opinion--and I, after watching and comparing the histories

of many families, indeed of every one with whom I have come in

contact for now five-and-thirty years, in town and country, can

only fear that their opinion is but too well founded on fact--that

in the great majority of cases, in all classes whatsoever, the

children are not equal to their parents, nor they, again, to their

grand-parents of the beginning of the century; and that this

degrading process goes on most surely and most rapidly in our

large towns, and in proportion to the antiquity of those towns,

and therefore in proportion to the number of generations during

which the degrading influences have been at work.

This and cognate dangers have been felt more and more deeply, as

the years have rolled on, by students of human society. To ward

them off, theory after theory has been put on paper, especially in

France, which deserve high praise for their ingenuity, less for

their morality, and, I fear, still less for their common sense.

For the theorist in his closet is certain to ignore, as

inconvenient to the construction of his Utopia, certain of those

broad facts of human nature which every active parish priest,

medical man, or poor-law guardian has to face every day of his

life.

Society and British human nature are what they have become by the

indirect influences of long ages, and we can no more reconstruct

the one than we can change the other. We can no more mend men by

theories than we can by coercion--to which, by-the-bye, almost all

these theorists look longingly as their final hope and mainstay.

We must teach men to mend their own matters, of their own reason,

and their own free-will. We must teach them that they are the

arbiters of their own destinies; and, to a fearfully large degree,

of their children's destinies after them. We must teach them not

merely that they ought to be free, but that they are free, whether

they know it or not, for good and for evil. And we must do that

in this case, by teaching them sound practical science; the

science of physiology as applied to health. So, and so only, can

we cheek--I do not say stop entirely--though I believe even that

to be ideally possible; but at least cheek the process of

degradation which I believe to be surely going on, not merely in

these islands, but in every civilised country in the world, in

proportion to its civilisation.

It is still a question whether science has fully discovered those

laws of hereditary health, the disregard of which causes so many

marriages disastrous to generations yet unborn. But much valuable

light has been thrown on this most mysterious and most important

subject during the last few years. That light--and I thank God

for it--is widening and deepening rapidly. And I doubt not that

in a generation or two more, enough will be known to be thrown

into the shape of practical and provable rules; and that, if not a

public opinion, yet at least, what is more useful far, a

widespread private opinion will grow up, especially among educated

women, which will prevent many a tragedy and save many a life.

But, as to the laws of personal health: enough, and more than

enough, is known already, to be applied safely and easily by any

adults, however unlearned, to the preservation not only of their

own health, but of that of their children.

The value of healthy habitations, of personal cleanliness, of pure

air and pure water, of various kinds of food, according as each

tends to make bone, fat, or muscle, provided only--provided only--

that the food be unadulterated; the value of various kinds of

clothing, and physical exercise, of a free and equal development

of the brain power, without undue overstrain in any one direction;

in one word, the method of producing, as far as possible, the

mentem sanam in corpore sano, and the wonderful and blessed

effects of such obedience to those laws of nature, which are

nothing but the good will of God expressed in facts--their

wonderful and blessed tendency, I say, to eliminate the germs of

hereditary disease, and to actually regenerate the human system--

all this is known; known as fully and clearly as any human

knowledge need be known; it is written in dozens of popular books

and pamphlets. And why should this divine voice, which cries to

man, tending to sink into effeminate barbarism through his own

hasty and partial civilisation: "It is not too late. For your

bodies, as for your spirits, there is an upward, as well as a

downward path. You, or if not you, at least the children whom you

have brought into the world, for whom you toil, for whom you

hoard, for whom you pray, for whom you would give your lives,--

they still may be healthy, strong, it may be beautiful, and have

all the intellectual and social, as well as the physical

advantages, which health, strength, and beauty give."--Ah, why is

this divine voice now, as of old, Wisdom crying in the streets,

and no man regarding her? I appeal to women, who are initiated,

as we men can never be, into the stern mysteries of pain, and

sorrow, and self-sacrifice;--they who bring forth children, weep

over children, slave for children, and, if they have none of their

own, then slave, with the holy instinct of the sexless bee, for

the children of others--Let them say, shall this thing be?

Let my readers pardon me if I seem to write too earnestly. That I

speak neither more nor less than the truth, every medical man

knows full well. Not only as a very humble student of physiology,

but as a parish priest of thirty years' standing, I have seen so

much unnecessary misery; and I have in other cases seen similar

misery so simply avoided; that the sense of the vastness of the

evil is intensified by my sense of the easiness of the cure.

Why, then--to come to practical suggestions--should there not be

opened in every great town in these realms a public school of

health? It might connect itself with--I hold that it should form

an integral part of--some existing educational institute. But it

should at least give practical lectures, for fees small enough to

put them within the reach of any respectable man or woman, however

poor, I cannot but hope that such schools of health, if opened in

the great manufacturing towns of England and Scotland, and,

indeed, in such an Irish town as Belfast, would obtain pupils in

plenty, and pupils who would thoroughly profit by what they hear.

The people of these towns are, most of them, specially accustomed

by their own trades to the application of scientific laws. To

them, therefore, the application of any fresh physical laws to a

fresh set of facts, would have nothing strange in it. They have

already something of that inductive habit of mind which is the

groundwork of all rational understanding or action. They would

not turn the deaf and contemptuous ear with which the savage and

the superstitious receive the revelation of nature's mysteries.

Why should not, with so hopeful an audience, the experiment be

tried far and wide, of giving lectures on health, as supplementary

to those lectures on animal physiology which are, I am happy to

say, becoming more and more common? Why should not people be

taught--they are already being taught at Birmingham--something

about the tissues of the body, their structure and uses, the

circulation of the blood, respiration, chemical changes in the air

respired, amount breathed, digestion, nature of food, absorption,

secretion, structure of the nervous system--in fact, be taught

something of how their own bodies are made and how they work?

Teaching of this kind ought to, and will, in some more civilised

age and country, be held a necessary element in the school course

of every child, just as necessary as reading, writing, and

arithmetic; for it is after all the most necessary branch of that

"technical education" of which we hear so much just now, namely,

the technic, or art, of keeping oneself alive and well.

But we can hardly stop there. After we have taught the condition

of health, we must teach also the condition of disease; of those

diseases specially which tend to lessen wholesale the health of

townsfolk, exposed to an artificial mode of life. Surely young

men and women should be taught something of the causes of zymotic

disease, and of scrofula, consumption, rickets, dipsomania,

cerebral derangement, and such like. They should be shown the

practical value of pure air, pure water, unadulterated food, sweet

and dry dwellings. Is there one of them, man or woman, who would

not be the safer and happier, and the more useful to his or her

neighbours, if they had acquired some sound notions about those

questions of drainage on which their own lives and the lives of

their children may every day depend? I say--women as well as men.

I should have said women rather than men. For it is the women who

have the ordering of the household, the bringing up of the

children; the women who bide at home, while the men are away, it

may be at the other end of the earth.

And if any say, as they have a right to say--"But these are

subjects which can hardly be taught to young women in public

lectures;" I rejoin--of course not, unless they are taught by

women--by women, of course, duly educated and legally qualified.

Let such teach to women, what every woman ought to know, and what

her parents will very properly object to her hearing from almost

any man. This is one of the main reasons why I have, for twenty

years past, advocated the training of women for the medical

profession; and one which countervails, in my mind, all possible

objections to such a movement. And now, thank God, we are seeing

the common sense of Great Britain, and indeed of every civilised

nation, gradually coming round to that which seemed to me, when I

first conceived of it, a dream too chimerical to be cherished save

in secret--the restoring woman to her natural share in that sacred

office of healer, which she held in the Middle Ages, and from

which she was thrust out during the sixteenth century.

I am most happy to see, for instance, that the National Health

Society, {3} which I earnestly recommend to the attention of my

readers, announces a "Course of Lectures for Ladies on Elementary

Physiology and Hygiene," by a lady, to which I am also most happy

to see, governesses are admitted at half-fees. Alas! how much

misery, disease, and even death might have been prevented, had

governesses been taught such matters thirty years ago, I, for one,

know too well. May the day soon come when there will be educated

women enough to give such lectures throughout these realms, to

rich as well as poor--for the rich, strange to say, need them

often as much as the poor do--and that we may live to see, in

every great town, health classes for women as well as for men,

sending forth year by year more young women and young men taught,

not only to take care of themselves and of their families, but to

exercise moral influence over their fellow-citizens, as champions

in the battle against dirt and drunkenness, disease and death.

There may be those who would answer--or rather, there would

certainly have been those who would have so answered thirty years

ago, before the so-called materialism of advanced science had

taught us some practical wisdom about education, and reminded

people that they have bodies as well as minds and souls--"You say,

we are likely to grow weaklier, unhealthier. And if it were so,

what matter? Mind makes the man, not body. We do not want our

children to be stupid giants and bravos; but clever, able, highly

educated, however weakly Providence or the laws of nature may have

chosen to make them. Let them overstrain their brains a little;

let them contract their chests, and injure their digestion and

their eyesight, by sitting at desks, poring over books. Intellect

is what we want. Intellect makes money. Intellect makes the

world. We would rather see our son a genius than a mere athlete."

Well: and so would I. But what if intellect alone does not even

make money, save as Messrs. Dodson and Fogg, Sampson Brass, and

Montagu Tigg were wont to make it, unless backed by an able,

enduring, healthy physique, such as I have seen, almost without

exception, in those successful men of business whom I have had the

honour and the pleasure of knowing? What if intellect, or what is

now called intellect, did not make the world, or the smallest

wheel or cog of it? What if, for want of obeying the laws of

nature, parents bred up neither a genius nor an athlete, but only

an incapable unhappy personage, with a huge upright forehead, like

that of a Byzantine Greek, filled with some sort of pap instead of

brains, and tempted alternately to fanaticism and strong drink?

We must, in the great majority of cases, have the CORPUS SANEM if

we want the MENTEM SANEM; and healthy bodies are the only

trustworthy organs for healthy minds. Which is cause and which is

effect, I shall not stay to debate here. But wherever we find a

population generally weakly, stunted, scrofulous, we find in them

a corresponding type of brain, which cannot be trusted to do good

work; which is capable more or less of madness, whether solitary

or epidemic. It may be very active; it may be very quick at

catching at new and grand ideas--all the more quick, perhaps, on

account of its own secret malaise and self-discontent; but it will

be irritable, spasmodic, hysterical. It will be apt to mistake

capacity of talk for capacity of action, excitement for

earnestness, virulence for force, and, too often; cruelty for

justice. It will lose manful independence, individuality,

originality; and when men act, they will act from the

consciousness of personal weakness, like sheep rushing over a

hedge, leaning against each other, exhorting each other to be

brave, and swaying about in mobs and masses. These were the

intellectual weaknesses which, as I read history, followed on

physical degradation in Imperial Rome, in Alexandria, in

Byzantium. Have we not seen them reappear, under fearful forms,

in Paris but the other day?

I do not blame; I do not judge. My theory, which I hold, and

shall hold, to be fairly founded on a wide induction, forbids me

to blame and to judge; because it tells me that these defects are

mainly physical; that those who exhibit them are mainly to be

pitied, as victims of the sins or ignorance of their forefathers.

But it tells me too, that those who, professing to be educated

men, and therefore bound to know better, treat these physical

phenomena as spiritual, healthy, and praiseworthy; who even

exasperate them, that they may make capital out of the weaknesses

of fallen man, are the most contemptible and yet the most

dangerous of public enemies, let them cloak their quackery under

whatsoever patriotic, or scientific, or even sacred words.

There are those again honest, kindly, sensible, practical men,

many of them; men whom I have no wish to offend; whom I had rather

ask to teach me some of their own experience and common sense,

which has learned to discern, like good statesmen, not only what

ought to be done, but what can be done--there are those, I say,

who would sooner see this whole question let alone. Their

feeling, as far as I can analyse it, seems to be that the evils of

which I have been complaining, are on the whole inevitable; or, if

not, that we can mend so very little of them, that it is wisest to

leave them alone altogether, lest, like certain sewers, "the more

you stir them, the more they smell." They fear lest we should

unsettle the minds of the many for whom these evils will never be

mended; lest we make them discontented; discontented with their

houses, their occupations, their food, their whole social

arrangements; and all in vain.

I should answer, in all courtesy and humility--for I sympathise

deeply with such men and women, and respect them deeply likewise--

but are not people discontented already, from the lowest to the

highest? And ought a man, in such a piecemeal, foolish, greedy,

sinful world as this is, and always has been, to be anything but

discontented? If he thinks that things are going all right, must

he not have a most beggarly conception of what going right means?

And if things are not going right, can it be anything but good for

him to see that they are not going right? Can truth and fact harm

any human being? I shall not believe so, as long as I have a

Bible wherein to believe. For my part, I should like to make

every man, woman, and child whom I meet discontented with

themselves, even as I am discontented with myself. I should like

to awaken in them, about their physical, their intellectual, their

moral condition, that divine discontent which is the parent, first

of upward aspiration and then of self-control, thought, effort to

fulfil that aspiration even in part. For to be discontented with

the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is

the very germ and first upgrowth of all virtue. Men begin at

first, as boys begin when they grumble at their school and their

schoolmasters, to lay the blame on others; to be discontented with

their circumstances--the things which stand around them; and to

cry, "Oh that I had this!" "Oh that I had that!" But by that way

no deliverance lies. That discontent only ends in revolt and

rebellion, social or political; and that, again, still in the same

worship of circumstances--but this time desperate--which ends, let

it disguise itself under what fine names it will, in what the old

Greeks called a tyranny; in which--as in the Spanish republics of

America, and in France more than once--all have become the

voluntary slaves of one man, because each man fancies that the one

man can improve his circumstances for him.

But the wise man will learn, like Epictetus the heroic slave, the

slave of Epaphroditus, Nero's minion--and in what baser and uglier

circumstances could human being find himself?--to find out the

secret of being truly free; namely, to be discontented with no man

and no thing save himself. To say not--"Oh that I had this and

that!" but "Oh that I were this and that!" Then, by God's help--

and that heroic slave, heathen though he was, believed and trusted

in God's help--"I will make myself that which God has shown me

that I ought to be and can be."

Ten thousand a year, or ten million a year, as Epictetus saw full

well, cannot mend that vulgar discontent with circumstances which

he had felt--and who with more right?--and conquered, and

despised. For that is the discontent of children, wanting always

more holidays and more sweets. But I wish my readers to have, and

to cherish, the discontent of men and women.

Therefore I would make men and women discontented, with the divine

and wholesome discontent, at their own physical frame, and at that

of their children. I would accustom their eyes to those precious

heirlooms of the human race, the statues of the old Greeks; to

their tender grandeur, their chaste healthfulness, their

unconscious, because perfect might: and say--There; these are

tokens to you, and to all generations yet unborn, of what man

could be once; of what he can be again if he will obey those laws

of nature which are the voice of God. I would make them

discontented with the ugliness and closeness of their dwellings; I

would make them discontented with the fashion of their garments,

and still more just now the women, of all ranks, with the fashion

of theirs; and with everything around them which they have the

power of improving, if it be at all ungraceful, superfluous,

tawdry, ridiculous, unwholesome. I would make them discontented

with what they call their education, and say to them--You call the

three Royal R's education? They are not education: no more is

the knowledge which would enable you to take the highest prizes

given by the Society of Arts, or any other body. They are not

education: they are only instruction; a necessary groundwork, in

an age like this, for making practical use of your education: but

not the education itself.

And if they asked me, What then education meant? I should point

them, first, I think, to noble old Lilly's noble old "Euphues," of

three hundred years ago, and ask them to consider what it says

about education, and especially this passage concerning that mere

knowledge which is nowadays strangely miscalled education. "There

are two principal and peculiar gifts in the nature of man,

knowledge and reason. The one"--that is reason--"commandeth, and

the other"--that is knowledge--"obeyeth. These things neither the

whirling wheel of fortune can change, nor the deceitful cavillings

of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, nor age abolish."

And next I should point them to those pages in Mr. Gladstone's

"Juventus Mundi," where he describes the ideal training of a Greek

youth in Homer's days; and say--There: that is an education fit

for a really civilised man, even though he never saw a book in his

life; the full, proportionate, harmonious educing-that is,

bringing out and developing--of all the faculties of his body,

mind, and heart, till he becomes at once a reverent yet self-

assured, a graceful and yet a valiant, an able and yet an eloquent

personage.

And if any should say to me--"But what has this to do with

science? Homer's Greeks knew no science;" I should rejoin--But

they had, pre-eminently above all ancient races which we know, the

scientific instinct; the teachableness and modesty; the clear eye

and quick ear; the hearty reverence for fact and nature, and for

the human body, and mind, and spirit; for human nature in a word,

in its completeness, as the highest fact upon this earth.

Therefore they became in after years, not only the great

colonisers and the great civilisers of the old world--the most

practical people, I hold, which the world ever saw; but the

parents of all sound physics as well as of all sound metaphysics.

Their very religion, in spite of its imperfections, helped forward

their education, not in spite of, but by means of that

anthropomorphism which we sometimes too hastily decry. As Mr.

Gladstone says: "As regarded all other functions of our nature,

outside the domain of the life to Godward--all those functions

which are summed up in what St. Paul calls the flesh and the mind,

the psychic and bodily life, the tendency of the system was to

exalt the human element, by proposing a model of beauty, strength,

and wisdom, in all their combinations, so elevated that the effort

to attain them required a continual upward strain. It made

divinity attainable; and thus it effectually directed the thought

and aim of man

Along the line of limitless desires.

Such a scheme of religion, though failing grossly in the

government of the passions, and in upholding the standard of moral

duties, tended powerfully to produce a lofty self-respect, and a

large, free, and varied conception of humanity. It incorporated

itself in schemes of notable discipline for mind and body, indeed

of a lifelong education; and these habits of mind and action had

their marked results (to omit many other greatnesses) in a

philosophy, literature, and art, which remain to this day

unrivalled or unsurpassed."

So much those old Greeks did for their own education, without

science and without Christianity. We who have both: what might

we not do, if we would be true to our advantages, and to

ourselves?

THE TWO BREATHS {4}

Ladies,--I have been honoured by a second invitation to address

you, and I dare not refuse it; because it gives me an opportunity

of speaking on a matter, knowledge and ignorance about which may

seriously affect your health and happiness, and that of the

children with whom you may have to do. I must apologise if I say

many things which are well known to many persons in this room:

they ought to be well known to all: but it is generally best to

assume total ignorance in one's hearers, and to begin from the

beginning.

I shall try to be as simple as possible; to trouble you as little

as possible with scientific terms; to be practical; and at the

same time, if possible, interesting.

I should wish to call this lecture "The Two Breaths:" not merely

"The Breath;" and for this reason: every time you breathe you

breathe two different breaths; you take in one, you give out

another. The composition of those two breaths is different.

Their effects are different. The breath which has been breathed

out must not be breathed in again. To tell you why it must not

would lead me into anatomical details, not quite in place here as

yet; though the day will come, I trust, when every woman entrusted

with the care of children will be expected to know something about

them. But this I may say: Those who habitually take in fresh

breath will probably grow up large, strong, ruddy, cheerful,

active, clear-headed, fit for their work. Those who habitually

take in the breath which has been breathed out by themselves, or

any other living creature, will certainly grow up, if they grow up

at all, small, weak, pale, nervous, depressed, unfit for work, and

tempted continually to resort to stimulants, and become drunkards.

If you want to see how different the breath breathed out is from

the breath taken in, you have only to try a somewhat cruel

experiment, but one which people too often try upon themselves,

their children, and their workpeople. If you take any small

animal with lungs like your own--a mouse, for instance--and force

it to breathe no air but what you have breathed already; if you

put it in a close box, and while you take in breath from the outer

air, send out your breath through a tube, into that box, the

animal will soon faint: if you go on long with this process, it

will die.

Take a second instance, which I beg to press most seriously on the

notice of mothers, governesses, and nurses. If you allow a child

to get into the habit of sleeping with its head under the bed-

clothes, and thereby breathing its own breath over and over again,

that child will assuredly grow pale, weak, and ill. Medical men

have cases on record of scrofula appearing in children previously

healthy, which could only be accounted for from this habit, and

which ceased when the habit stopped. Let me again entreat your

attention to this undoubted fact.

Take another instance, which is only too common: If you are in a

crowded room, with plenty of fire and lights and company, doors

and windows all shut tight, how often you feel faint--so faint

that you may require smelling-salts or some other stimulant. The

cause of your faintness is just the same as that of the mouse's

fainting in the box; you and your friends, and, as I shall show

you presently, the fire and the candles likewise, having been all

breathing each other's breaths, over and over again, till the air

has become unfit to support life. You are doing your best to

enact over again the Highland tragedy, of which Sir James Simpson

tells in his lectures to the working-classes of Edinburgh, when at

a Christmas meeting thirty-six persons danced all night in a small

room with a low ceiling, keeping the doors and windows shut. The

atmosphere of the room was noxious beyond description; and the

effect was, that seven of the party were soon after seized with

typhus fever, of which two died. You are inflicting on yourselves

the torments of the poor dog, who is kept at the Grotto del Cane,

near Naples, to be stupefied, for the amusement of visitors, by

the carbonic acid gas of the Grotto, and brought to life again by

being dragged into the fresh air; nay, you are inflicting upon

yourselves the torments of the famous Black Hole of Calcutta:

and, if there was no chimney in the room, by which some fresh air

could enter, the candles would soon burn blue, as they do, you

know, when ghosts appear; your brains become disturbed; and you

yourselves ran the risk of becoming ghosts, and the candles of

actually going out.

Of this last fact there is no doubt; for if, instead of putting a

mouse into the box, you will put a lighted candle, and breathe

into the tube as before, however gently, you will in a short time

put the candle out.

Now, how is this? First, what is the difference between the

breath you take in and the breath you give out? And next, why has

it a similar effect on animal life and a lighted candle?

The difference is this. The breath which you take in is, or ought

to be, pure air, composed, on the whole, of oxygen and nitrogen,

with a minute portion of carbonic acid.

The breath which you give out is an impure air, to which has been

added, among other matters which will not support life, an excess

of carbonic acid.

That this is the fact you can prove for yourselves by a simple

experiment. Get a little lime-water at the chemist's, and breathe

into it through a glass tube; your breath will at once make the

lime-water milky. The carbonic acid of your breath has laid hold

of the lime, and made it visible as white carbonate of lime--in

plain English, as common chalk.

Now I do not wish, as I said, to load your memories with

scientific terms: but I beseech you to remember at least these

two, oxygen gas and carbonic acid gas; and to remember that, as

surely as oxygen feeds the fire of life, so surely does carbonic

acid put it out.

I say, "the fire of life." In that expression lies the answer to

our second question: Why does our breath produce a similar effect

upon the mouse and the lighted candle? Every one of us is, as it

were, a living fire. Were we not, how could we be always warmer

than the air outside us? There is a process; going on perpetually

in each of us, similar to that by which coals are burnt in the

fire, oil in a lamp, wax in a candle, and the earth itself in a

volcano. To keep each of those fires alight, oxygen is needed;

and the products of combustion, as they are called, are more or

less the same in each case--carbonic acid and steam.

These facts justify the expression I just made use of--which may

have seemed to some of you fantastical--that the fire and the

candles in the crowded room were breathing the same breath as you

were. It is but too true. An average fire in the grate requires,

to keep it burning, as much oxygen as several human beings do;

each candle or lamp must have its share of oxygen likewise, and

that a very considerable one, and an average gas-burner--pray

attend to this, you who live in rooms lighted with gas--consumes

as much oxygen as several candles. All alike are making carbonic

acid. The carbonic acid of the fire happily escapes up the

chimney in the smoke: but the carbonic acid from the human beings

and the candles remains to poison the room, unless it be

ventilated.

Now, I think you may understand one of the simplest, and yet most

terrible, cases of want of ventilation--death by the fumes of

charcoal. A human being shut up in a room, of which every crack

is closed, with a pan of burning charcoal, falls asleep, never to

wake again. His inward fire is competing with the fire of

charcoal for the oxygen of the room; both are making carbonic acid

out of it: but the charcoal, being the stronger of the two, gets

all the oxygen to itself, and leaves the human being nothing to

inhale but the carbonic acid which it has made. The human being,

being the weaker, dies first: but the charcoal dies also. When

it has exhausted all the oxygen of the room, it cools, goes out,

and is found in the morning half-consumed beside its victim. If

you put a giant or an elephant, I should conceive, into that room,

instead of a human being, the case would be reversed for a time:

the elephant would put out the burning charcoal by the carbonic

acid from his mighty lungs; and then, when he had exhausted all

the air in the room, die likewise of his own carbonic acid.

Now, I think, we may see what ventilation means, and why it is

needed.

Ventilation means simply letting out the foul air, and letting in

the fresh air; letting out the air which has been breathed by men

or by candles, and letting in the air which has not. To

understand how to do that, we must remember a most simple chemical

law, that a gas as it is warmed expands, and therefore becomes

lighter; as it cools, it contracts, and becomes heavier.

Now the carbonic acid in the breath which comes out of our mouth

is warm, lighter than the air, and rises to the ceiling; and

therefore in any unventilated room full of people, there is a

layer of foul air along the ceiling. You might soon test that for

yourselves, if you could mount a ladder and put your heads there

aloft. You do test it for yourselves when you sit in the

galleries of churches and theatres, where the air is palpably more

foul, and therefore more injurious, than down below.

Where, again, work-people are employed in a crowded house of many

storeys, the health of those who work on the upper floors always

suffers most.

In the old monkey-house of the Zoological Gardens, when the cages

were on the old plan, tier upon tier, the poor little fellows in

the uppermost tier--so I have been told--always died first of the

monkey's constitutional complaint, consumption, simply from

breathing the warm breath of their friends below. But since the

cages have been altered, and made to range side by side from top

to bottom, consumption--I understand--has vastly diminished among

them.

The first question in ventilation, therefore, is to get this

carbonic acid safe out of the room, while it is warm and light and

close to the ceiling; for if you do not, this happens: The

carbonic acid gas cools and becomes heavier; for carbonic acid, at

the same temperature as common air, is so much heavier than common

air, that you may actually--if you are handy enough--turn it from

one vessel to another, and pour out for your enemy a glass of

invisible poison. So down to the floor this heavy carbonic acid

comes, and lies along it, just as it lies often in the bottom of

old wells, or old brewers' vats, as a stratum of poison, killing

occasionally the men who descend into it. Hence, as foolish a

practice as I know is that of sleeping on the floor; for towards

the small hours, when the room gets cold, the sleeper on the floor

is breathing carbonic acid.

And here one word to those ladies who interest themselves with the

poor. The poor are too apt in times of distress to pawn their

bedsteads and keep their beds. Never, if you have influence, let

that happen. Keep the bedstead, whatever else may go, to save the

sleeper from the carbonic acid on the floor.

How, then, shall we get rid of the foul air at the top of the

room? After all that has been written and tried on ventilation, I

know no simpler method than putting into the chimney one of

Arnott's ventilators, which may be bought and fixed for a few

shillings; always remembering that it must be. fixed into the

chimney as near the ceiling as possible. I can speak of these

ventilators from twenty-five years' experience. Living in a house

with low ceilings, liable to become overcharged with carbonic

acid, which produces sleepiness in the evening, I have found that

these ventilators keep the air fresh and pure; and I consider the

presence of one of these ventilators in a room more valuable than

three or four feet additional height of ceiling. I have found,

too, that their working proves how necessary they are, from this

simple fact: You would suppose that, as the ventilator opens

freely into the chimney, the smoke would be blown down through it

in high winds, and blacken the ceiling: but this is just what

does not happen. If the ventilator be at all properly poised, so

as to shut with a violent gust of wind, it will at all other

moments keep itself permanently open; proving thereby that there

is an up-draught of heated air continually escaping from the

ceiling up the chimney. Another very simple method of ventilation

is employed in those excellent cottages which Her Majesty has

built for her labourers round Windsor. Over each door a sheet of

perforated zinc, some eighteen inches square, is fixed; allowing

the foul air to escape into the passage; and in the ceiling of the

passage a similar sheet of zinc, allowing it to escape into the

roof. Fresh air, meanwhile, should be obtained from outside, by

piercing the windows, or otherwise. And here let me give one hint

to all builders of houses: If possible, let bedroom windows open

at the top as well as at the bottom.

Let me impress the necessity of using some such contrivances, not

only on parents and educators, but on those who employ workpeople,

and above all on those who employ young women in shops or in work-

rooms. What their condition may be in this city I know not; but

most painful it has been to me in other places, when passing

through warehouses or workrooms, to see the pale, sodden, and, as

the French would say, "etiolated" countenances of the girls who

were passing the greater part of the day in them; and painful,

also, to breathe an atmosphere of which habit had, alas! made them

unconscious, but which to one coming out of the open air was

altogether noxious, and shocking also; for it was fostering the

seeds of death, not only in the present but future generations.

Why should this be? Everyone will agree that good ventilation is

necessary in a hospital, because people cannot get well without

fresh air. Do they not see that by the same reasoning good

ventilation is necessary everywhere, because people cannot remain

well without fresh air? Let me entreat those who employ women in

workrooms, if they have no time to read through such books as Dr.

Andrew Combe's "Physiology applied to Health and Education," and

Madame de Wahl's "Practical Hints on the Moral, Mental, and

Physical Training of Girls," to procure certain tracts published

by Messrs. Jarrold, Paternoster Row, for the Ladies' Sanitary

Association; especially one which bears on this subject: "The

Black-hole in our own Bedrooms;" Dr. Lankester's "School Manual of

Health;" or a manual on ventilation, published by the Metropolitan

Working Classes Association for the Improvement of Public Health.

I look forward--I say it openly--to some period of higher

civilisation, when the Acts of Parliament for the ventilation of

factories and workshops shall be largely extended, and made far

more stringent; when officers of public health shall be empowered

to enforce the ventilation of every room in which persons are

employed for hire: and empowered also to demand a proper system

of ventilation for every new house, whether in country or in town.

To that, I believe, we must come: but I had sooner far see these

improvements carried out, as befits the citizens of a free

country, in the spirit of the Gospel rather than in that of the

Law; carried out, not compulsorily and from fear of fines, but

voluntarily, from a sense of duty, honour, and humanity. I

appeal, therefore, to the good feeling of all whom it may concern,

whether the health of those whom they employ, and therefore the

supply of fresh air which they absolutely need, are not matters

for which they are not, more or less, responsible to their country

and their God.

And if any excellent person of the old school should answer me:

"Why make all this fuss about ventilation? Our forefathers got on

very well without it"--I must answer that, begging their pardons,

our ancestors did nothing of the kind. Our ancestors got on

usually very ill in these matters: and when they got on well, it

was because they had good ventilation in spite of themselves.

First. They got on very ill. To quote a few remarkable instances

of longevity, or to tell me that men were larger and stronger on

the average in old times, is to yield to the old fallacy of

fancying that savages were peculiarly healthy, because those who

were seen were active and strong. The simple answer is, that the

strong alone survived, while the majority died from the severity

of the training. Savages do not increase in number; and our

ancestors increased but very slowly for many centuries. I am not

going to disgust my audience with statistics of disease: but

knowing something, as I happen to do, of the social state and of

the health of the Middle and Elizabethan Ages, I have no

hesitation in saying that the average of disease and death was far

greater then than it is now. Epidemics of many kinds, typhus,

ague, plague--all diseases which were caused more or less by bad

air--devastated this land and Europe in those days with a horrible

intensity, to which even the choleras of our times are mild. The

back streets, the hospitals, the gaols, the barracks, the camps--

every place in which any large number of persons congregated, were

so many nests of pestilence, engendered by uncleanliness, which

defiled alike the water which was drunk and the air which was

breathed; and as a single fact, of which the tables of insurance

companies assure us, the average of human life in England has

increased twenty-five per cent. since the reign of George I.,

owing simply to our more rational and cleanly habits of life.

But secondly, I said that when our ancestors got on well, they did

so because they got ventilation in spite of themselves. Luckily

for them, their houses were ill-built; their doors and windows

would not shut. They had lattice-windowed houses, too; to live in

one of which, as I can testify from long experience, is as

thoroughly ventilating as living in a lantern with the horn broken

out. It was because their houses were full of draughts, and still

more, in the early Middle Age, because they had no glass, and

stopped out the air only by a shutter at night, that they sought

for shelter rather than for fresh air, of which they sometimes had

too much; and, to escape the wind, built their houses in holes,

such as that in which the old city of Winchester stands. Shelter,

I believe, as much as the desire to be near fish in Lent, and to

occupy the rich alluvium of the valleys, made the monks of Old

England choose the river-banks for the sites of their abbeys.

They made a mistake therein, which, like most mistakes, did not go

unpunished. These low situations, especially while the forests

were yet thick on the hills around, were the perennial haunts of

fever and ague, produced by subtle vegetable poisons, carried in

the carbonic acid given off by rotten vegetation. So there,

again, they fell in with man's old enemy--bad air. Still, as long

as the doors and windows did not shut, some free circulation of

air remained. But now, our doors and windows shut only too tight.

We have plate-glass instead of lattices; and we have replaced the

draughty and smoky, but really wholesome open chimney, with its

wide corners and settles, by narrow registers, and even by stoves.

We have done all we can, in fact, to seal ourselves up

hermetically from the outer air, and to breath our own breaths

over and over again; and we pay the penalty of it in a thousand

ways unknown to our ancestors, through whose rooms all the winds

of heaven whistled, and who were glad enough to shelter themselves

from draughts in the sitting-room by the high screen round the

fire, and in the sleeping-room by the thick curtains of the four-

post bedstead, which is now rapidly disappearing before a higher

civilisation. We therefore absolutely require to make for

ourselves the very ventilation from which our ancestors tried to

escape.

But, ladies, there is an old and true proverb, that you may bring

a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink. And in like

wise it is too true, that you may bring people to the fresh air,

but you cannot make them breath it. Their own folly, or the folly

of their parents and educators, prevents their lungs being duly

filled and duly emptied. Therefore the blood is not duly

oxygenated, and the whole system goes wrong. Paleness, weakness,

consumption, scrofula, and too many other ailments, are the

consequences of ill-filled lungs. For without well-filled lungs,

robust health is impossible.

And if anyone shall answer: "We do not want robust health so much

as intellectual attainment; the mortal body, being the lower

organ, must take its chance, and be even sacrificed, if need be to

the higher organ--the immortal mind"--To such I reply, You cannot

do it. The laws of nature, which are the express will of God,

laugh such attempts to scorn. Every organ of the body is formed

out of the blood; and if the blood be vitiated, every organ

suffers in proportion to its delicacy; and the brain, being the

most delicate and highly specialised of all organs, suffers most

of all, and soonest of all, as everyone knows who has tried to

work his brain when his digestion was the least out of order.

Nay, the very morals will suffer. From ill-filled lungs, which

signify ill-repaired blood, arise year by year an amount not

merely of disease, but of folly, temper, laziness, intemperance,

madness, and, let me tell you fairly, crime--the sum of which will

never be known till that great day when men shall be called to

account for all deeds done in the body, whether they be good or

evil.

I must refer you on this subject again to Andrew Combe's

"Physiology," especially chapters iv. and vii.; and also to

chapter x. of Madame de Wahl's excellent book. I will only say

this shortly, that the three most common causes of ill-filled

lungs, in children and in young ladies, are stillness, silence,

and stays.

First, stillness; a sedentary life, and want of exercise. A girl

is kept for hours sitting on a form writing or reading, to do

which she must lean forward; and if her schoolmistress cruelly

attempts to make her sit upright, and thereby keep the spine in an

attitude for which Nature did not intend it, she is thereby doing

her best to bring on that disease, so fearfully common in girls'

schools, lateral curvature of the spine. But practically the girl

will stoop forward. And what happens? The lower ribs are pressed

into the body, thereby displacing more or less something inside.

The diaphragm in the meantime, which is the very bellows of the

lungs, remains loose; the lungs are never properly filled or

emptied; and an excess of carbonic acid accumulates at the bottom

of them. What follows? Frequent sighing to get rid of it;

heaviness of head; depression of the whole nervous system under

the influence of the poison of the lungs; and when the poor child

gets up from her weary work, what is the first thing she probably

does? She lifts up her chest, stretches, yawns, and breathes

deeply--Nature's voice, Nature's instinctive cure, which is

probably regarded as ungraceful, as what is called "lolling" is.

As if sitting upright was not an attitude in itself essentially

ungraceful, and such as no artist would care to draw. As if

"lolling," which means putting the body in the attitude of the

most perfect ease compatible with a fully-expanded chest, was not

in itself essentially graceful, and to be seen in every reposing

figure in Greek bas-reliefs and vases; graceful, and like all

graceful actions, healthful at the same time. The only tolerably

wholesome attitude of repose, which I see allowed in average

school-rooms, is lying on the back on the floor, or on a sloping

board, in which case the lungs must be fully expanded. But even

so, a pillow, or some equivalent, ought to be placed under the

small of the back: or the spine will be strained at its very

weakest point.

I now go on to the second mistake--enforced silence. Moderate

reading aloud is good: but where there is any tendency to

irritability of throat or lungs, too much moderation cannot be

used. You may as well try to cure a diseased lung by working it,

as to cure a lame horse by galloping him. But where the breathing

organs are of average health let it be said once and for all, that

children and young people cannot make too much noise. The parents

who cannot bear the noise of their children have no right to have

brought them into the world. The schoolmistress who enforces

silence on her pupils is committing--unintentionally no doubt, but

still committing--an offence against reason, worthy only of a

convent. Every shout, every burst of laughter, every song--nay,

in the case of infants, as physiologists well know, every moderate

fit of crying--conduces to health, by rapidly filling and emptying

the lung, and changing the blood more rapidly from black to red,

that is, from death to life. Andrew Combe tells a story of a

large charity school, in which the young girls were, for the sake

of their health, shut up in the hall and school-room during play

hours, from November till March, and no romping or noise allowed.

The natural consequences were, the great majority of them fell

ill; and I am afraid that a great deal of illness has been from

time to time contracted in certain school-rooms, simply through

this one cause of enforced silence. Some cause or other there

must be for the amount of ill-health and weakliness which prevails

especially among girls of the middle classes in towns, who have

not, poor things, the opportunities which richer girls have, of

keeping themselves in strong health by riding, skating, archery,--

that last quite an admirable exercise for the chest and lungs, and

far preferable to croquet, which involves too much unwholesome

stooping.--Even a game of ball, if milliners and shop-girls had

room to indulge in one after their sedentary work, might bring

fresh spirits to many a heart, and fresh colour to many a cheek.

I spoke just now of the Greeks. I suppose you will all allow that

the Greeks were, as far as we know, the most beautiful race which

the world ever saw. Every educated man knows that they were also

the cleverest of all races; and, next to his Bible, thanks, God

for Greek literature.

Now, these people had made physical as well as intellectual

education a science as well as a study. Their women practised

graceful, and in some cases even athletic, exercises. They

developed, by a free and healthy life, those figures which remain

everlasting and unapproachable models of human beauty: but--to

come to my third point--they wore no stays. The first mention of

stays that I have ever found is in the letters of dear old

Synesius, Bishop of Cyrene, on the Greek coast of Africa, about

four hundred years after the Christian era. He tells us how, when

he was shipwrecked on a remote part of the coast, and he and the

rest of the passengers were starving on cockles and limpets, there

was among them a slave girl out of the far East, who had a pinched

wasp-waist, such as you may see on the old Hindoo sculptures, and

such as you may see in any street in a British town. And when the

Greek ladies of the neighbourhood found her out, they sent for her

from house to house, to behold, with astonishment and laughter,

this new and prodigious, waist, with which it seemed to them it

was impossible for a human being to breathe or live; and they

petted the poor girl, and fed her, as they might a dwarf or a

giantess, till she got quite fat and comfortable, while her owners

had not enough to eat. So strange and ridiculous seemed our

present fashion to the descendants of those who, centuries before,

had imagined, because they had seen living and moving, those

glorious statues which we pretend to admire, but refuse to

imitate.

It seems to me that a few centuries hence, when mankind has learnt

to fear God more, and therefore to obey more strictly those laws

of nature and of science which are the will of God--it seems to

me, I say, that in those days the present fashion of tight lacing

will be looked back upon as a contemptible and barbarous

superstition, denoting a very low level of civilisation in the

peoples which have practised it. That for generations past women

should have been in the habit--not to please men, who do not care

about the matter as a point of beauty--but simply to vie with each

other in obedience to something called fashion--that they should,

I say, have been in the habit of deliberately crushing that part

of the body which should be specially left free, contracting and

displacing their lungs, their heart, and all the most vital and

important organs, and entailing thereby disease, not only on

themselves but on their children after them; that for forty years

past physicians should have been telling them of the folly of what

they have been doing; and that they should as yet, in the great

majority of cases, not only turn a deaf ear to all warnings, but

actually deny the offence, of which one glance of the physician or

the sculptor, who know what shape the human body ought to be,

brings them in guilty--this, I say, is an instance of--what shall

I call it?--which deserves at once the lash, not merely of the

satirist, but of any theologian who really believes that God made

the physical universe. Let me, I pray you, appeal to your common

sense for a moment. When any one chooses a horse or a dog,

whether for strength, for speed, or for any other useful purpose,

the first thing almost to be looked at is the girth round the

ribs; the room for heart and lungs. Exactly in proportion to that

will be the animal's general healthiness, power of endurance, and

value in many other ways. If you will look at eminent lawyers and

famous orators, who have attained a healthy old age, you will see

that in every case they are men, like the late Lord Palmerston,

and others whom I could mention, of remarkable size, not merely in

the upper, but in the lower part of the chest; men who had,

therefore, a peculiar power of using the diaphragm to fill and to

clear the lungs, and therefore to oxygenate the blood of the whole

body. Now, it is just these lower ribs, across which the

diaphragm is stretched like the head of a drum, which stays

contract to a minimum. If you advised owners of horses and hounds

to put their horses or their hounds into stays, and lace them up

tight, in order to increase their beauty, you would receive, I

doubt not, a very courteous, but certainly a very decided, refusal

to do that which would spoil not merely the animals themselves,

but the whole stud or the whole kennel for years to come. And if

you advised an orator to put himself into tight stays, he, no

doubt, again would give a courteous answer; but he would reply--if

he was a really educated man--that to comply with your request

would involve his giving up public work, under the probable

penalty of being dead within the twelve-month.

And how much work of every kind, intellectual as well as physical,

is spoiled or hindered; how many deaths occur from consumption and

other complaints which are the result of this habit of tight

lacing, is known partly to the medical men, who lift up their

voices in vain, and known fully to Him who will not interfere with

the least of His own physical laws to save human beings from the

consequences of their own wilful folly.

And now--to end this lecture with more pleasing thoughts--What

becomes of this breath which passes from your lips? Is it merely

harmful; merely waste? God forbid! God has forbidden that

anything should be merely harmful or merely waste in this so wise

and well-made world. The carbonic acid which passes from your

lips at every breath--ay, even that which oozes from the volcano

crater when the eruption is past--is a precious boon to thousands

of things of which you have daily need. Indeed there is a sort of

hint at physical truth in the old fairy tale of the girl, from

whose lips, as she spoke, fell pearls and diamonds; for the

carbonic acid of your breath may help hereafter to make the pure

carbonate of lime of a pearl, or the still purer carbon of a

diamond. Nay, it may go--in such a world of transformations do we

live--to make atoms of coal strata, which after being buried for

ages beneath deep seas, shall be upheaved in continents which are

yet unborn, and there be burnt for the use of a future race of

men, and resolved into their original elements. Coal, wise men

tell us, is on the whole breath and sunlight; the breath of living

creatures who have lived in the vast swamps and forests of some

primeval world, and the sunlight which transmuted that breath into

the leaves and stems of trees, magically locked up for ages in

that black stone, to become, when it is burnt at last, light and

carbonic acid as it was at first. For though you must not breathe

your breath again, you may at least eat your breath, if you will

allow the sun to transmute it for you into vegetables; or you may

enjoy its fragrance and its colour in the shape of a lily or a

rose. When you walk in a sunlit garden, every word you speak,

every breath you breathe, is feeding the plants and flowers

around. The delicate surface of the green leaves absorbs the

carbonic acid, and parts it into its elements, retaining the

carbon to make woody fibre, and courteously returning you the

oxygen to mingle with the fresh air, and be inhaled by your lungs

once more. Thus do you feed the plants; just as the plants feed

you: while the great life-giving sun feeds both; and the geranium

standing in the sick child's window does not merely rejoice his

eye and mind by its beauty and freshness, but repays honestly the

trouble spent on it; absorbing the breath which the child needs

not, and giving to him the breath which he needs.

So are the services of all things constituted according to a

Divine and wonderful order, and knit together in mutual dependence

and mutual helpfulness--a fact to be remembered with hope and

comfort: but also with awe and fear. For as in that which is

above nature, so in nature itself; he that breaks one physical law

is guilty of all. The whole universe, as it were, takes up arms

against him; and all nature, with her numberless and unseen

powers, is ready to avenge herself on him, and on his children

after him, he knows not when nor where. He, on the other hand,

who obeys the laws of nature with his whole heart and mind, will

find all things working together to him for good. He is at peace

with the physical universe. He is helped and befriended alike by

the sun above his head and the dust beneath his feet; because he

is obeying the will and mind of Him who made sun, and dust, and

all things; and who has given them a law which cannot be broken.

THRIFT {5}

Ladies,--I have chosen for the title of this lecture a practical

and prosaic word, because I intend the lecture itself to be as

practical and prosaic as I can make it, without becoming

altogether dull.

The question of the better or worse education of women is one far

too important for vague sentiment, wild aspirations, or Utopian

dreams.

It is a practical question, on which depends not merely money or

comfort, but too often health and life, as the consequences of a

good education, or disease and death--I know too well of what I

speak--as the consequences of a bad one.

I beg you, therefore, to put out of your minds at the outset any

fancy that I wish for a social revolution in the position of

women; or that I wish to see them educated by exactly the same

methods, and in exactly the same subjects, as men. British lads,

on an average, are far too ill-taught still, in spite of all

recent improvements, for me to wish that British girls should be

taught in the same way.

Moreover, whatever defects there may have been--and defects there

must be in all things human--in the past education of British

women, it has been most certainly a splendid moral success. It

has made, by the grace of God, British women the best wives,

mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, that the world, as far as I

can discover, has yet seen.

Let those who will, sneer at the women of England. We who have to

do the work and to fight the battle of life know the inspiration

which we derive from their virtue, their counsel, their

tenderness, and--but too often--from their compassion and their

forgiveness. There is, I doubt not, still left in England many a

man with chivalry and patriotism enough to challenge the world to

show so perfect a specimen of humanity as a cultivated British

woman.

But just because a cultivated British woman is so perfect a

personage; therefore I wish to see all British women cultivated.

Because the womanhood of England is so precious a treasure; I wish

to see none of it wasted. It is an invaluable capital, or

material, out of which the greatest possible profit to the nation

must be made. And that can only be done by Thrift; and that,

again, can only be attained by knowledge.

Consider that word Thrift. If you will look at "Dr. Johnson's

Dictionary," or if you know your "Shakespeare," you will see that

Thrift signified originally profits, gain, riches gotten--in a

word, the marks of a man's thriving.

How, then, did the word Thrift get to mean parsimony, frugality,

the opposite of waste? Just in the same way as economy--which

first, of course, meant the management of a household--got to mean

also the opposite of waste.

It was found that in commerce, in husbandry, in any process, in

fact, men throve in proportion as they saved their capital, their

material, their force.

Now this is a great law which runs through life; one of those laws

of nature--call them, rather, laws of God--which apply not merely

to political economy, to commerce, and to mechanics; but to

physiology, to society; to the intellect, to the heart, of every

person in this room.

The secret of thriving is thrift; saving of force; to get as much

work as possible done with the least expenditure of power, the

least jar and obstruction, least wear and tear.

And the secret of thrift is knowledge. In proportion as you know

the laws and nature of a subject, you will be able to work at it

easily, surely, rapidly, successfully; instead of wasting your

money or your energies in mistaken schemes, irregular efforts,

which end in disappointment and exhaustion.

The secret of thrift, I say, is knowledge. The more you know, the

more you can save yourself and that which belongs to you; and can

do more work with less effort.

A knowledge of the laws of commercial credit, we all know, saves

capital, enabling a less capital to do the work of a greater.

Knowledge of the electric telegraph saves time; knowledge of

writing saves human speech and locomotion; knowledge of domestic

economy saves income; knowledge of sanitary laws saves health and

life; knowledge of the laws of the intellect saves wear and tear

of brain; and knowledge of the laws of the spirit--what does it

not save?

A well-educated moral sense, a well-regulated character, saves

from idleness and ennui, alternating with sentimentality and

excitement, those tenderer emotions, those deeper passions, those

nobler aspirations of humanity, which are the heritage of the

woman far more than of the man; and which are potent in her, for

evil or for good, in proportion as they are left to run wild and

undisciplined; or are trained and developed into graceful,

harmonious, self-restraining strength, beautiful in themselves,

and a blessing to all who come under their influence.

What, therefore, I recommend to ladies in this lecture is thrift:

thrift of themselves and of their own powers: and knowledge as

the parent of thrift.

And because it is well to begin with the lower applications of

thrift, and to work up to the higher, I am much pleased to hear

that the first course of the proposed lectures to women in this

place will be one on domestic economy.

I presume that the learned gentleman who will deliver these

lectures will be the last to mean by that term the mere saving of

money; that he will tell you, as--being a German--he will have

good reason to know, that the young lady who learns thrift in

domestic economy is also learning thrift of the very highest

faculties of her immortal spirit. He will tell you, I doubt not--

for he must know--how you may see in Germany young ladies living

in what we more luxurious British would consider something like

poverty; cooking, waiting at table, and performing many a

household office which would be here considered menial; and yet

finding time for a cultivation of the intellect, which is,

unfortunately, too rare in Great Britain.

The truth is, that we British are too wealthy. We make money, if

not too rapidly for the good of the nation at large, yet too

rapidly, I fear, for the good of the daughters of those who make

it. Their temptation--I do not, of course, say they all yield to

it--but their temptation is, to waste of the very simplest--I had

almost said, if I may be pardoned the expression, of the most

barbaric--kind; to an oriental waste of money, and waste of time;

to a fondness for mere finery, pardonable enough, but still a

waste; and to the mistaken fancy that it is the mark of a lady to

sit idle and let servants do everything for her.

But it is not of this sort of waste of which I wish to speak to-

day. I only mention the matter in passing, to show that high

intellectual culture is not incompatible with the performance of

homely household duties, and that the moral success of which I

spoke just now need not be injured, any more than it is in

Germany, by intellectual success likewise. I trust that these

words may reassure those parents, if any such there be here, who

may fear that these lectures will withdraw women from their

existing sphere of interest and activity. That they should

entertain such a fear is not surprising, after the extravagant

opinions and schemes which have been lately broached in various

quarters.

The programme to these lectures expressly disclaims any such

intentions; and I, as a husband and a father, expressly disclaim

any such intention likewise.

"To fit women for the more enlightened performance of their

special duties;" to help them towards learning how to do better

what we doubt not many of them are already doing well; is, I

honestly believe, the only object of the promoters of this scheme.

Let us see now how some of these special duties can be better

performed by help of a little enlightenment as to the laws which

regulate them.

Now, no man will deny--certainly no man who is past forty-five,

and whose digestion is beginning to quail before the lumps of beef

and mutton which are the boast of a British kitchen, and to

prefer, with Justice Shallow, and, I presume, Sir John Falstaff

also, "any pretty little tiny kickshaws"--no man, I say, who has

reached that age, but will feel it a practical comfort to him to

know that the young ladies of his family are at all events good

cooks; and understand, as the French do, thrift in the matter of

food.

Neither will any parent who wishes, naturally enough, that his

daughters should cost him as little as possible; and wishes,

naturally enough also, that they should be as well dressed as

possible, deny that it would be a good thing for them to be

practical milliners and mantua-makers; and, by making their own

clothes gracefully and well, exercise thrift in clothing.

But, beside this thrift in clothing, I am not alone, I believe, in

wishing for some thrift in the energy which produces it. Labour

misapplied, you will agree, is labour wasted; and as dress, I

presume, is intended to adorn the person of the wearer, the making

a dress which only disfigures her may be considered as a plain

case of waste. It would be impertinent in me to go into any

details: but it is impossible to walk about the streets now

without passing young people who must be under a deep delusion as

to the success of their own toilette. Instead of graceful and

noble simplicity of form, instead of combinations of colour at

once rich and delicate, because in accordance with the chromatic

laws of nature, one meets with phenomena more and more painful to

the eye, and startling to common sense, till one would be hardly

more astonished, and certainly hardly more shocked, if in a year

or two, one should pass someone going about like a Chinese lady,

with pinched feet, or like a savage of the Amazons, with a wooden

bung through her lower lip. It is easy to complain of these

monstrosities: but impossible to cure them, it seems to me,

without an education of the taste, an education in those laws of

nature which produce beauty in form and beauty in colour. For

that the cause of these failures lies in want of education is

patent. They are most common in--I had almost said they are

confined to--those classes of well-to-do persons who are the least

educated; who have no standard of taste of their own; and who do

not acquire any from cultivated friends and relations: who, in

consequence, dress themselves blindly according to what they

conceive to be the Paris fashions, conveyed at third-hand through

an equally uneducated dressmaker; in innocent ignorance of the

fact--for fact I believe it to be--that Paris fashions are

invented now not in the least for the sake of beauty, but for the

sake of producing, through variety, increased expenditure, and

thereby increased employment; according to the strange system

which now prevails in France of compelling, if not prosperity, at

least the signs of it; and like schoolboys before a holiday,

nailing up the head of the weather-glass to insure fine weather.

Let British ladies educate themselves in those laws of beauty

which are as eternal as any other of nature's laws; which may be

seen fulfilled, as Mr. Ruskin tells us, so eloquently in every

flower and every leaf, in every sweeping down and rippling wave;

and they will be able to invent graceful and economical dresses

for themselves, without importing tawdry and expensive ugliness

from France.

Let me now go a step farther, and ask you to consider this: There

are in England now a vast number, and an increasing number, of

young women who, from various circumstances which we all know,

must in after life be either the mistresses of their own fortunes,

or the earners of their own bread. And, to do that wisely and

well, they must be more or less women of business, and to be women

of business they must know something of the meaning of the words

Capital, Profit, Price, Value, Labour, Wages, and of the relation

between those two last. In a word, they must know a little

political economy. Nay, I sometimes think that the mistress of

every household might find, not only thrift of money, but thrift

of brain; freedom from mistakes, anxieties, worries of many kinds,

all of which eat out the health as well as the heart, by a little

sound knowledge of the principles of political economy.

When we consider that every mistress of a household is continually

buying, if not selling; that she is continually hiring and

employing labour in the form of servants; and very often, into the

bargain, keeping her husband's accounts: I cannot but think that

her hard-worked brain might be clearer, and her hard-tried desire

to do her duty by every subject in her little kingdom, might be

more easily satisfied, had she read something of what Mr. John

Stuart Mill has written, especially on the duties of employer and

employed. A capitalist, a commercialist, an employer of labour,

and an accountant--every mistress of a household is all these,

whether she likes it or not; and it would be surely well for her,

in so very complicated a state of society as this, not to trust

merely to that mother-wit, that intuitive sagacity and innate

power of ruling her fellow-creatures, which carries women so nobly

through their work in simpler and less civilised societies.

And here I stop to answer those who may say--as I have heard it

said--That a woman's intellect is not fit for business; that when

a woman takes to business, she is apt to do it ill, and

unpleasantly likewise, to be more suspicious, more irritable, more

grasping, more unreasonable, than regular men of business would

be: that--as I have heard it put--"a woman does not fight fair."

The answer is simple. That a woman's intellect is eminently

fitted for business is proved by the enormous amount of business

she gets through without any special training for it: but those

faults in a woman of which some men complain are simply the

results of her not having had a special training. She does not

know the laws of business. She does not know the rules of the

game she is playing; and therefore she is playing it in the dark,

in fear and suspicion, apt to judge of questions on personal

grounds, often offending those with whom she has to do, and

oftener still making herself miserable over matters of law or of

business, on which a little sound knowledge would set her head and

her heart at rest.

When I have seen widows, having the care of children, of a great

household, of a great estate, of a great business, struggling

heroically, and yet often mistakenly; blamed severely for

selfishness and ambition, while they were really sacrificing

themselves with the divine instinct of a mother for their

children's interest: I have stood by with mingled admiration and

pity, and said to myself: "How nobly she is doing the work

without teaching! How much more nobly would she have done it had

she been taught! She is now doing her work at the most enormous

waste of energy and of virtue: had she had knowledge, thrift

would have followed it; she would have done more work with far

less trouble. She will probably kill herself if she goes on;

while sound knowledge would have saved her health, saved her

heart, saved her friends, and helped the very loved ones for whom

she labours, not always with success."

A little political economy, therefore, will at least do no harm to

a woman; especially if she have to take care of herself in after

life; neither, I think, will she be much harmed by some sound

knowledge of another subject, which I see promised in these

lectures: "Natural philosophy, in its various branches, such as

the chemistry of common life, light, heat, electricity, etc. etc."

A little knowledge of the laws of light, for instance, would teach

many women that by shutting themselves up day after day, week

after week, in darkened rooms, they are as certainly committing a

waste of health, destroying their vital energy, and diseasing

their brains, as if they were taking so much poison the whole

time.

A little knowledge of the laws of heat would teach women not to

clothe themselves and their children after foolish and

insufficient fashions, which in this climate sow the seeds of a

dozen different diseases, and have to be atoned for by perpetual

anxieties, and by perpetual doctors' bills; and as for a little

knowledge of the laws of electricity, one thrift I am sure it

would produce--thrift to us men, of having to answer continual

inquiries as to what the weather is going to be,