Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/87

Rh the world has ever known would not effect the desired result. "In these bewildered times," said Carlyle, "all education has run to tongue." This is emphatically true of moral education; but the "line upon line and precept upon precept" plan of moral training has ever failed, and will ever fail, of the best results. The child must be exercised in moral conduct until a real knowledge of acting rightly is acquired. The Esquimau baby cries for blubber as the American child does for sugar, and splutters at the first taste of candy as do our own pale infants on their introduction to cod-liver oil—a fair illustration of a universal principle.

Whether, then, the facts with which we have to deal be physical or whether they be moral, they have their causes: vice and virtue are products resulting from complex combinations of the more simple phenomena on which they depend. We are, in short, the true offspring, not the mere step-children, of our mother, Nature; and as our bodies are built up of and maintained by gases, fluids, and solids temporarily withdrawn from the crust of the earth and its gaseous envelope, so our characters are being continuously molded, primarily by the universal natural forces, but more immediately by the social forces incident to life in communities. Conduct is contagious. The manifestations of sentiment, of passion, of impulse, etc., excite similar manifestations in others who have the capacity for like experiences; and to the contagia viva of the bacteriologist must be added a moral contagion the existence of which is proved by the occurrence of epidemics of crime, especially of crimes of the gravest character. A discussion of the methods by which moral contagion is disseminated can not be entered upon at this time. Suffice it to say that, in the city of Ethica, no newspaper will be permitted to act the part of a culture-fluid for the propagation of this contagion by the publication of criminal reports which familiarize the minds of their readers with the details of crime, if they do not actually create crime epidemics. Neither will the system of inoculation—by the "sowing of wild-oats," so called, or other similar methods—receive the slightest encouragement, since this plan is more likely to establish a favorable diathesis than to secure immunity from disease. The maintenance of a high physical tone is most important, since, in the suggestive language of Rousseau, "The weaker the body, the more it commands; the stronger it is, the better it obeys"—a seeming paradox but a true indication of that state of desirable self-control which consists in the ascendency of the intellectual and moral over the instinctive and emotional traits, and which more than anything else distinguishes the highest and best exponents of humanity from its least developed types.

Having, as I believe, demonstrated the dependence of moral development upon hygienic living as its physical groundwork, and the fundamental incompatibility between physical disease and moral health,