310 TRANSACTIONS OP THE 



have the lowest average. Indoor confinement, want of sufficient exer- 

 cise, breathing irritating substances and noxious odors from the material 

 of their work, reduces their avei'age to thirty-six. At the head of the 

 health list stands the farmer, whose average is sixty-four, seven years 

 longer than the lawyer or minister, ten years longer than the doctor, 

 and nearly thirteen years longer than the blacksmith and jeweller. 

 Such is the influence of farm labor and country air on physical vigor. 

 It gives the longest lease upon life. 



And then the dwellers in the rural districts are exempt from those 

 tempting artificial irregularities tbat so early sap and wither humanity 

 in large towns and cities. Saloons, theatres, gaming clubs, billiard 

 rooms and restaurants, with their brilliant lights and gorgeous attire, do 

 not attract the laborer, at the close of the day's work, to late hours, 

 dissipation and unnatural excesses. He is not so apt to arise with a bad 

 headache in the morning, a macaroni sky, and fagged, jaded and irritable, 

 drag himself languidly to his work. How many worn by thought, har- 

 rassed by commercial care, or broken down by carousal and connival 

 pleasures, have exclaimed with Talleyrand, "Oh, that sleep could be 

 bought — that it was in the market at any quotation." The farmer is not 

 liable to this nervous sleeplessness, does not have to woo Morpheus with 

 opiates, cordials and hot slings, and is not apt to be chased in his sleep 

 by horrid monsters, bitten by ogres, and awakened by strange noises, 

 stumbling over graves or plunging into rolling floods. You may safely 

 wager that the young bacchinal who dreamed that the devil came one 

 night and sat down upon his stomach, holding the Bunker Hill Monu- 

 ment in his lap, did not live on a ranch. And then what an appetite the 

 field laborer has ? He needs no rum bitters, nor brandy cocktails, to 

 appreciate his breakfast. And what large families they have in the 

 country. Fresh rosy girls, that blush without paint, and stalwart boys 

 that do not stray out too late at night and early wreck their virtue and 

 manhood upon the Barbary Coast. 



The second element of manhood consists in mental activity and a richly 

 furnished mind. Man is distinguished from all the lower orders by his 

 intellectual nature. The birds sing but they never compose music. The 

 bee and the beaver build but they possess no system of architecture. 

 The cattle roam in bands but they have no social organization. In poetic 

 license, instinct may be considered as the dim harbinger of reason, but 

 in no sense whatever can a man's dog ever rise to the dignity of a con- 

 scious partner or shareholder along with its master in the responsible 

 trust of thinking freely and wisely directing. Only so far as you think 

 do you live, and come into possession of your patrimony of existence. 

 You live by eating, and wisely directed thought is a mode of mental 

 nourishment. As the strength of the laboring man demands a regular 

 supply of good solid food, so too, no one can hope to possess vigor of 

 mind, agility of thought in planning and combining, who does not regu- 

 larly supply the mind with wholesome material for thought. If you 

 need cordials, appetisers, dainty morsels and pungent condiments to give 

 you an appetite for your food, you are certainly in a bad way; but if 

 you have a keen relish for the ordinary staples of the table you have 

 reason to be thankful that you are in such good condition. So, too, if 

 curiosity, the appetite of the mind, is wide awake to the beauty, order 

 and wealth of the universe, and can find regalement in good books and 

 journals, or art, science, history or some of the inviting walks of litera- 

 ture, then you are in a healthy state ; but if the common-places of con- 

 versation, the saws about the weather, neighborhood gossip, the items of 



