No. 216.] 443 



a forcible idea of the value of labor, is presented by this fact! Yet, 

 what a sick workman or operative would be to a capitalist who was 

 obliged to maintain him, a sick citizen is to the republic. Every 

 sick man, every man rendered unserviceable by general debility, or 

 specific ailment, must be subtracted from a nation's available re- 

 sources. He not only adds nothing to the common stock, but he 

 draws his subsistence in some form — and often, too, a very expensive 

 subsistence, from the storehouse which the industry of others has 

 filled. Omitting all considerations of personal and domestic suffer- 

 ing, of the extinction of intellectual power, and of those moral ab- 

 errations which originate in physical derangement and disease — and 

 considering the race under the mere aspect of a money making pow- 

 er — in this respect, it is clear that the health and strength of one 

 community, if set in opposition to the debility and infirmity of an- 

 other, would be sufficient not only to determine the balance of trade, 

 but to settle all other points of relative superiority. Let such infor- 

 mation be diffused through the public, as all the children in our schools 

 might easily acquire, and a single generation would not pass away, 

 without the transfer of immense sums to the other .side of the profit 

 and loss account in the national leger. Of course, I do not mean 

 that all diseases could be abolished at once, even by a universal dif- 

 fusion of a knowledge of their causes; or that the era foretold by 

 the prophet would be ushered in, when *' the child shall die a hun- 

 dred years old," and when there shall be no " old man that hath not 

 filled his days." The violation of those beautiful and benign laws 

 which the Creator has inwrought into our system, has been too hein- 

 ous, and too long persevered in by the race, to be expiated or atoned 

 for in a single age. Disease and debility, transmitted through a long 

 line of ancestors, have acquired a momentum by the length of the 

 descent, which cannot at once be overcome. But I do mean, if this 

 subject were generally understood, that such a change would be 

 wrought in a single generation, that a broad and deep current of 

 wealth would be made to change its direction; and instead of mil- 

 lions annually flowing outward from the common treasury, to defray 

 the various expenditures of sickness, that treasury would be replen- 

 ished by an equal number of millions, coined from the mint and from 

 the ore, of labor-loving health. Yet amid all our pecuniary specula- 

 tions, this grand financial operation of substituting health smd strength 

 for sickness and debility — that is, immense gains for immense expen- 

 ditures — has been unheard of. 



" In the army and navy, where the expediency of giving battle 

 has been discussed in a council of war; or afterwards, when the 



