356 HEALTH. 



improves the expirations of all, that they grow lighter, and sail 

 away into the blue places where impurity is at a constant minimum. 

 After which, no doubt, the prayers of congregations go up more 

 readily to heaven, because they have no longer to fight a passage 

 through a putrid roof of vapors overhanging the church, and of 

 which the steeple is the pillar. They are not skunked by vested 

 interests, reminding them of the dead, or tied like coffins to their 

 flowing robes. 



But the psychical office of the lungs is the true and the major 

 problem. How to carry out every breath through the society, so 

 that man shall inspire, expire and conspire ! It is the problem of 

 the production of a common understanding of what is to be thought 

 and done — of how all the men at the same windlass shall heave in 

 tune (pp. 121-122). Truth here is the sky in which all breaths 

 must be received and purified, and successive aspirations thither are 

 these second social windpipes. Moreover, the due sectarizing of 

 mankind is required; unanimity or one-breathingness in masses; no 

 skepticism from one man straitening the breasts of his fellows; for 

 skepticism is social asthma, in which the age forgets how to breathe. 

 The conspiring of the efforts of many to one end, is then a deside- 

 ratum for the public health, enjoyment or integrity of the lungs; and 

 when it has place, each effort pervades a society, and self-breathing 

 is the most attenuated possible. But we do not know the length of 

 the public vibration of the lungs; the size of any chest when it has 

 the truth of Man in it; or the delight of expanding and contracting 

 for a commonweal. Still, this is the problem. 



Our exactions rise as we enter more deeply into the human frame, 

 to ask it what it wants for a world. We are almost afraid to inter- 

 rogate the heart upon the point; if we open its mouth, and encourage 

 it, the organ may prove too voluble for any good purpose. But re- 

 membering that the brain has to speak after it, we shall allow it a 

 voice, trusting to correction some day from that sequel. 



commit the subject to Prince Albert, as worthy of his patronage, and as one 

 that would add another lustre to that diadem of national services which he is 

 determined to wear. The people will never forget the framer of an Albert 

 Charter, if it make the scenes of our fair islands accessible to the poor as to 

 the rich. 



