THE AGE OF GYMNASTICS. 135 



years," and satisfied, as any reasonable man might be who had wit- 

 nessed one hundred and fifty rotations of the four seasons, and enjoyed 

 all their blessings in perfect health. 



There is no doubt that the military triumphs of the ancient Greeks 

 were the natural result of their physical education. " A nation," says 

 Jean Jacques Rousseau, " which can boast of 20,000 men, is not vincible." 

 Virility as well as virtue was originally derived from a word which 

 means simply strength, just as our Anglo-Saxon ancestors used to speak 

 of the best man of a parish, without special reference to the most regu- 

 lar church-goer. Strength is the parent of valor and self-confidence, 

 and confidence in the valor and strength of armed companions begets 

 that national heroism which enabled the republican Greeks, the Swiss, 

 the Circassians, and the Montenegrins, to defy the most powerful and 

 numerically superior of their would-be conquerors. 



Not to their political but to their physical constitutions these nations 

 owed their long independence. The historical records of the last three 

 thousand years demonstrate the strange fact that international wars, 

 almost without a single exception, ended by the victory of northern 

 nations over their southern rivals. The Carthaginians, originally 

 natives of Phoenicia, conquered the Numidian principalities, but were 

 in turn conquered by their Roman neighbors ; Rome, victorious against 

 all her southern, southeastern, and southwestern rivals, was herself 

 struck down by the iron arm of the Visigoth, the north-Spanish Chris- 

 tians overcoming the south-Spanish Moors, the northern Turks wrest- 

 ing the sceptre from their southern fellow-Mohammedans, the north- 

 Mongol Tartars oppressing the south-Mongol Chinese, the North-Ger- 

 man Prussians bullying the southern members of the Confederation, 

 the Northmen of Scandinavia conquering Normandy, Brittany, and 

 Great Britain, the house of Hapsburg eclipsed by the house of Hohen- 

 zollern, a North-Italian kingdom absorbing the southern states of the 

 peninsula the same phenomenon, in hundred variations, repeating 

 itself from China to Peru, from the Trojan War to the civil war of the 

 North American States. 



What does all this mean, but that the fortune of war is biased by 

 bodily strength ? Rome was not vanquished by the intellectual supe- 

 riority of the Visigoths, nor Maria Theresa by the moral merits of 

 Frederick's cause, but we may safely assume that in all international 

 contests the physical advantage was on the side of the northern cham- 

 pion. The climate and the comparative sterility of a cold country 

 necessitate a continual struggle with the adverse powers of Nature, and 

 beget that hardy and robust constitution which is the basis of all mili- 

 tary efficiency. But, this incidental advantage which northern races 

 derive from the inclemency of their latitude, any nation might secure 

 in a more direct and much more agreeable way, by introducing a thor- 

 ough and popular system of physical education. 



The fallen races, as the nations of Southern Europe and South Amer- 



