g; and the fact that so few
of our girls and women really enjoy it, that so few are capable of
walking four or five miles without fatigue, and that they come in, after
a walk of one mile, jaded and tired, instead of invigorated, points to a
grave error of omission in their education. The walk of the little girl
should be so regular a thing, so much a part of the day's routine, that
she would as soon think of dispensing with her morning bath as of
passing a day without it.[7] Healthy children of three years old, who
are educated to walk regularly, can, as I know by actual careful
observation, walk two miles at once without fatigue, coming in at the
close, brighter and more active than when they set out. This matter of
walking is a matter which, as well as sleep, food and clothing, belongs
to education; and if the girl does not enjoy walking--nay, if she does
not demand it with as sharp an appetite as she has for her food and
sleep, it is generally because she has not been properly and rationally
educated.

If it is said that it is "not natural" for some to like to walk, the
only proper answer to the objection would be that the question whether a
thing is natural or not is not at all pertinent, and involves an entire
misunderstanding of education itself. The very essence of civilization,
of morality, and of religion, consists in the overruling and directing
of the merely natural. By nature, man is not man at all. Only in so far
as by force of spirit he overcomes, rules, and directs the nature in
him, can he lay any claim to manhood. Education, physical, intellectual,
moral or religious, is in its process only this directing of what is
natural for us. Its material is the natural man; its result is the
spiritual man; its process is the rationally-directed transition from
the former to the latter. Between the helpless infant, aimlessly
stretching out its feeble arms, and the well-trained and
fully-developed man; between the mind of the savage who roams the
forest, and the mind of Bacon or Shakespeare; between the brute who
strikes down his wife as he would knock over a stick of wood in his way,
and the physician who stands at his post, tenderly and wisely caring for
the fever-stricken patients in the Memphis hospitals, laying down his
life for strangers; between the man who follows the caprice of this or
that moment, as a desire for present pleasure may suggest, and the
noblest Christian who daily sacrifices his own to the D