Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/397

Rh physical system of a single individual. Where, for many generations, this horrid entailment of maladies has not been broken by a single obedient and virtuous life, who can conceive of the animal debasements and depravities that may centre in a single person? At every descent, the bad may become worse; and the possible series of deterioration is infinite. Before the human race, or any part of it, becomes more diseased, or physically more vile, is it not time to arrest and to restore? This can be done through education or through miracles, and it would require more than three hundred and sixty five miracles every year to preserve health and strength under our present vicious social habits. Those who do not expect the intervention of miracles, are false to their families, to the community, and to God, if they do not urge forward the work of physical education as the only means of rescuing the race from an infinity of sicknesses, weaknesses, and pains. Public schools are the only instrumentality for inculcating upon the community at large, a knowledge of the great laws of health and life.

“There never was such a necessity for imparting power to the human intellect, and of replenishing it with knowledge as at the present time; and in no country is this necessity so imperative as in our own. The common affairs of life require a hundred times more knowledge now than they did a century ago. New forms, and kinds of business too, are daily emerging into practice, which must be conducted with intelligence and skill, or they will ruin their conductors. How much more knowledge and art are requisite to make a cotton or woollen factory, with all its nice and numerous appendages, than to manage a spinning-wheel or a distaff; to manage a locomotive on a railroad, than to drive a team on a highway; to manage a telegraph, than to send a courier, &c. The profoundest sciences are working their way into the every-day business of life, and carrying power and beauty, and multiplication