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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



and the result. Those who have seen the perfect 

 type of unselfish old age, where love is as bright 

 as in the days of childhood, will understand this. 

 But I must not pursue this subject any further. 



And now, after all this expatiating over a 

 very wide extent of country, it is time to ask my- 

 self, as you will no doubt have asked me, the ques- 

 tion : " What does it all come to ? What is the 

 practical drift ? What are we to do ? " 



Undoubtedly, this question should have been 

 before us from the outset. Disquisitions on the 

 structure of society, which are intended to leave 

 us where they found us, have always filled me 

 with a sense of unutterable ennui. Sir Isaac 

 Newton, as we all know, compares scientific dis- 

 coverers to children picking up shells on the sea- 

 shore. Well, shells on the sea-shore may be pol- 

 ished and put into a cabinet, or something pretty 

 may be made of them ; but analysis of the evils 

 of society, unless something is to come of it, is 

 more like a little boy pulling his drum to pieces 

 to see what is inside. We had so much better 

 spend our time in listening to Wagner or looking 

 at Mr. Butne Jones's pictures. Yet, if I am not 

 wholly wrong, there is an intensely practical ob- 

 ject in the kind of thoughts which I have tried 

 to set before you. And I speak with the less 

 diffidence, that they are none of my own origi- 

 nating. The seeds of all of them were sown by 

 another. 



Let us see to what we have come. We have 

 seen that for civilized man health is an infinitely 

 deeper and more complex word than is generally 

 supposed ; that it implies the vigorous and har- 

 monious working together of all functions, not 

 physical only, but mental and moral ; not lungs 

 merely and heart and muscle and digestive organs, 

 but of nerve and brain ; that a very great deal 

 more enters into the subject than considerations 

 of pure air, and pure water, and unpoisoned food, 

 and wholesome houses, and disinfection, and vacci- 

 nation, and drainage, and sewage irrigation ; that 

 these things are of real, and urgent, and unques- 

 tionable moment, but that they are not all that is 

 wanted, nor yet nearly so much as half what is 

 wanted ; and, further, that so long as they are 

 considered as being all, so long as exclusive con- 

 sideration is given to them, precisely so long will 

 their attainment be impossible. We have all 

 looked at Dr. Richardson's beautiful picture of 

 Tlygieia, the city of health, and the thought 

 forces itself upon some of us, Where will the 

 servants be lodged ? The people who clean the 

 chimneys and brush the beautiful parquet floor- 

 ing — what wages will they get, and where will 



they live? Will there be any costermongers, 

 any poor Irish, any pauperism, any wholesale 

 out-relief, any ignorant or indolent almsgiving, 

 any sectarian soup-kitchens; and, as a conse- 

 quence of all these things, any poor people flock- 

 ing from far and wide toward this vision of food 

 without work ; and then, when their patronesses 

 have run away from Hygieia for the London 

 season, ready to do charing- work for eighteen- 

 pence a day? Or is there to be no London 

 season for the happy and contented dwellers in 

 this wonderful city ? No imperious calls on 

 dress-makers, and temptations to their work-wom- 

 en to break the factory act or starve ? No sudden 

 revolutions of fashion from silks to velvet, from 

 alpaca to cashmere, turning myriads of spinners 

 and weavers out of work in Bradford or in 

 Coventry, and overtaxing the factories of other 

 places, thus driving in country -people to the 

 towns before houses can be built for tbem, de- 

 moralizing them by sudden flushes of high wages, 

 poisoning them in overcrowded lodgings, and 

 then, when the tide of fashion changes, again 

 turning them adrift? Or, again, will there be 

 any house-speculators in this city? "Will the 

 town-council be empowered to pass building by- 

 laws ? if so, will it be elected by universal suf- 

 frage, and in that case is it certain that there will 

 be no vestryman or councilman anxious for rents 

 and glad to get the building-standard a little low- 

 ered ? Or will publicans be excluded by law, 

 and the alcoholic question satisfactorily solved ? 

 The luxury problem — one man's labor for a day 

 being consumed by another in five minutes ; the 

 new machinery question — involving sudden pri- 

 vation of work to hundreds, sudden accession of 

 unwholesome work and wages, and demoralizing 

 town-conditions to thousands ; the capital and 

 labor question in every one of its aspects — how 

 for a moment can we dream of cities of Hygieia 

 without taking account of these things ? And 

 even supposing it were otherwise, fancy what a 

 city of valetudinarians it would be ! Fancy a 

 life in which the preservation of health were 

 made the one great object of concern. Think 

 of the commonplaces of every-day talk. How 

 one would yearn for the small-talk and scandal I 

 of the vulgarest watering-place, by comparison ! j 

 We must not forget that the highest health, i 

 like the highest virtue, supposes the unconscious- 

 ness of its own existence. Struggling, as we in 

 England, and more especially in London and i 

 Lancashire, are now, against social diseases of j 

 a special and altogether exceptional kind, pro- 

 duced by revolutionary confusion and by one-sided 



