HYGIENE AS A BASIS OF MORALS. 77 



smiths the world has ever known would not effect the desired result. 

 " In these bewildered times," said Carlyle, " all education has run 

 to tongue." This is emphatically true of moral education ; hut the 

 " line upon Hue and precept upon precept " plan of moral training has 

 ever failed, and will ever fail, of the best results. The child must be 

 exercised in moral conduct until a real knowledge of acting rightly is 

 acquired. The Esquimau baby cries for blubber as the American child 

 does for sugar, and splutters at the first taste of candy as do our own 

 pale infants on their introduction to cod-liver oil a fair illustration of 

 a universal principle. 



Whether, then, the facts with which we have to deal be physical 

 or whether they be moral, they have their causes : vice and virtue are 

 products resulting from complex combinations of the more simple 

 phenomena on which they depend. We are, in short, the true off- 

 spring, not the mere step-children, of our mother, Nature ; and as our 

 bodies are built up of and maintained by gases, fluids, and solids 

 temporarily withdrawn from the crust of the earth and its gaseous en- 

 velope, so our characters are being continuously molded, primarily by 

 the universal natural forces, but more immediately by the social forces 

 incident to life in communities. Conduct is contagious. The mani- 

 festations of sentiment, of passion, of impulse, etc., excite similar 

 manifestations in others who have the capacity for like experiences ; 

 and to the contagia viva of the bacteriologist must be added a moral 

 contagion the existence of which is pi*oved by the occurrence of epi- 

 demics of crime, especially of crimes of the gravest character. A dis- 

 cussion of the methods by which moral contagion is disseminated 

 can not be entered upon at this time. Suffice it to say that, in the 

 city of Ethica, no newspaper will be permitted to act the part of a 

 culture-fluid for the propagation of this contagion by the publication 

 of criminal reports which familiarize the minds of their readers with 

 the details of crime, if they do not actually create crime epidemics. 

 Neither will the system of inoculation by the "sowing of wild-oats," 

 so called, or other similar methods receive the slightest encourage- 

 ment, since this plan is more likely to establish a favorable diathesis 

 than to secure immunity from disease. The maintenance of a high 

 physical tone is most important, since, in the suggestive language of 

 Rousseau, " The weaker the body, the more it commands ; the stronger 

 it is, the better it obeys " a seeming paradox but a true indication of 

 that state of desirable self-control which consists in the ascendency of 

 the intellectual and moral over the instinctive and emotional traits, 

 and which more than anything else distinguishes the highest and best 

 exponents of humanity from its least developed types. 



Having, as I believe, demonstrated the dependence of moral devel- 

 opment upon hygienic living as its physical groundwork, and the fun- 

 damental incompatibility between physical disease and moral health, 



