h threatens the American people,
because of their unwise and disproportioned stimulation of the brain. It
is assumed, almost as an axiom, that there is "a deficiency of physical
health in America." Especially is it assumed that great mental progress,
either of races or of individuals, has been generally purchased at the
expense of the physical frame. Indeed, it is one of the questions of the
day, how the saints, that is, those devoted to literary and professional
pursuits, shall obtain good and serviceable bodies; or, to widen the
query, how the finest intellectual culture can exist side by side with
the noblest physical development; or, to bring this question into a form
that shall touch us most sharply, how our boys and girls can obtain all
needful knowledge and mental discipline, and yet keep full of graceful
and buoyant vitality.

What do we say to the theories and convictions which are underneath this
language? What answer shall we make to these questions? What answer
ought we to make? Our first reply would be, We doubt the proposition.
We ask for the broad and firm basis of undoubted facts upon which it
rests. And we enter an opposite plea. We affirm that the saints have as
good bodies as other people, and that they always did have. We deny that
they need to be patched up or watched over any more than their
neighbors. They live as long and enjoy as much as the rest of mankind.
They can endure as many hard buffets, and come out as tough and strong,
as the veriest dolt whose intellectual bark foundered in the unsounded
depths of his primer. The world's history through, the races which are
best taught have the best endowment of health. Nay, in our own New
England, with just such influences, physical, mental, and moral, as
actually exist, there is no deterioration in real vitality to weep over.

We hold, then, on this subject very different opinions from those which
prevail in many quarters. We believe in the essential healthfulness of
literary culture, and in the invigorating power of sound knowledge.
Emphatically do we believe that our common schools have been in the
aggregate a positive physical benefit. We are confident, that, just to
the degree that the unseen force within a man receives its rightful
development, does vigorous life flow in every current that beats from
heart to extremities. With entire respect for the opinions of others,
even while we cannot concur with them, with a readiness to admit that
the a