e Government, by
the Sanitary Commission, and by State agencies. Then we reply, that this
tenderness of the soldier, if tenderness it be, and this sagacity, if
sagacity prompted the care, were both the offspring of that high
intelligence which is the proper result of popular education.

* * * * *

There is but one possible mode of escape from such testimony. This whole
train of argument is inconclusive, it may be asserted, because what is
maintained is not that intellectual culture is unhealthful, where it is
woven into the web of active life, but only where the pursuit of
knowledge is one's business. It may be readily allowed, that, where the
whole nature is kept alive by the breath of outward enterprise, when the
great waves of this world's excitements are permitted to roll with
purifying tides into the inmost recesses of the soul, the results of
mental culture may be modified. But what of the saints? What of the
literary men _par excellence_?

Ah! if you restrain us to that line of inquiry, the argument will be
trebly strong, and the facts grow overwhelmingly pertinent and
conclusive. Will you examine the careful registry of deaths in
Massachusetts which has been kept the last twenty years? It will inform
you that the classes whose average of life is high up, almost the
highest up, are with us the classes that work with the brain,--the
judges, the lawyers, the physicians, the clergymen, the professors in
your colleges. The very exception to this statement rather confirms than
contradicts our general position, that intellectual culture is
absolutely invigorating. The cultivators of the soil live longest. But
note that it is the educated, intelligent farmers, the farmers of
Massachusetts, the farmers of a State of common schools, the farmers who
link thought to labor, who live long. And doubtless, if they carried
more thought into their labor, if they were more intelligent, if they
were better educated, they would live yet longer. At any rate, in
England the cultivators of her soil, her down-trodden peasantry,
sluggish and uneducated, do not live out half their days. Very likely
the farmer's lot, _plus_ education and _plus_ habits of mental activity,
is the healthiest as it is the primal condition of man. Nevertheless,
considering what is the general opinion, it is surprising how slight is
the advantage which he has even then over the purely literary classes.

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