THE SOCIAL MAP. 359 



is all in all in the primary. The fitness of society to every man, is 

 the condition of this last demand of the heart for health. It is a 

 mad claim : worse perhaps than that of those sanitary reformers who 

 would grasp the winds and wash them clean, sweeten Leeds and 

 purify Sierra Leone, abolish ague or typhus from the rural districts, 

 or drunkenness from all classes. We believe however that it is 

 only the same problem as theirs, but stated for a very exacting 

 organ, the heart. 



How shall any of this be secured? If we cannot manage common 

 nature, and lead it as health into our dwellings, how can we sweeten 

 this vast and terrible life, which gives and takes our moral diseases, 

 and whistles its comedies through our ruined affections; which ac- 

 cepts the pollutions of bad hearts, and the wail of broken ones, and 

 mixes them in its columns to press us more heavily into the king- 

 dom of pain? All that we can say in reply is, that the heart must 

 deserve its universe before it gets it; the present world is the fatal 

 logic of its diseases, the other, which we have described, must be the 

 logic of its healths. It is. an untieable knot, excepting on the prin- 

 ciple of a religious alteration of man, or a Deus intersit. For if 

 already the community depends on the individual, and vice vend, 

 then they are equated, and without the intervention of some third 

 power, there is no hope of improvement. But still, under the 

 guidance of God, both the man and the society step out of the fatal 

 circle, and acquire new duties again : and hence we cannot doubt 

 that in the public cause the community must be worked upon by 

 communal means, and the individual by private means, and that both 

 these will be reformatory, entering into the spirit of Providence. 



But let us reassert our claim to be map-makers, and not travelers 

 or colonizers. It is allowable to exhibit an organic geography, like 

 the physical, though on a glance at the result, it is seen to be rather 

 a mighty blank of desiderata than a habitable globe. Here, we say, 

 are ten thousand square leagues on which no grass grows, no rain 

 falls, whence no rivers issue, where the oases have dangers of their 

 own, and where a few sparse lions haunt with horrible hunger the 

 white bones of old camels and travelers. Here are regions where 

 man's greatest works and his smallest pests, fleas and pyramids, 

 come together. Here are the verdurous shores of pestilence, invit- 



