uld 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 an athlete." Well: and so would
I. But what if intellect alone does not even make money, save as Messrs.
Dodson & 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,
individua