OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. A DISCOURSE DELIVERED BEFORE THE LONDON "LADIES' SANITARY ASSOCIATION," FEBRUARY 28, 1865. BY "I^-s^U GARTH WILKINSON, M.D. THY KINGDOM COME, THY WILL BE DONE, AS IN HEAVEN, EVE^N SO UPON THE EARTH. BOSTON: S. WELLES CONE. NEW YORK: HURD & HOUGHTON. . PHILADELPHIA: J. S. CLAXTON. CINCINNATI: R. CLARKE & CO. CHICAGO : J. R. WALSH & CO. 1865. 1S4>5 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. We are met together to-day, as I understand, to take friendly counsel about Health in some of its larger acceptations; and frankness, and the spirit of freedom, may preside over thought, and humane toleration occupy her easy chair whilst diverse words are spoken. It is well that it should be so; for in this world we know far too little of each other. From good gen- eral society politics are excluded, religion is excluded, social science is excluded; and in fine, whatever men can seriously and earnestly differ upon is excluded; and the result is, that insipidity and deadness are included, and happy evenings are not common. I believe we are approaching a time when the nobler subjects will be solicited to come forth; when a group of bishops will feel morally uncomfortable unless there is a good proportion of dissenting clergymen among them ; when Whig, Tory, and Radical, each standing firmly on the plank of his own opinions, will consider themselves as peculiar political tem- peraments that cannot help being what they are, but are strictly bound to make the best of it; when Homoeopathy and Allop- athy will regard each other as different businesses of medicine, suiting different minds, but listening to each other, and inevitably endowing each other; when an American and an. Englishman will be able to take stock of each other's ways and sentiments, not only with no vituperation, but with thankfulness to God for 4 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. variety ; and finally, when the beliefs and aspirations and faiths of men will be interesting to their fellows, whether they form part of our creed or not; because, according to God's great fact, it takes all the men that ever existed, and all that ever will exist, to make up the human mind; and more than all men to reveal the human spirit. Now then, in regard to Health, we have to gather in very great elements from many different realms of nature and of mind ; from realms in the existence of which possibly some of us do not believe; but then those who do, will be kindly, per- haps even" genially tolerated and heard in their attempt to bring home new continents to their fellows. On the other hand, if we attempt universality, we can shake hands all round with limitations, which indeed constitute the matter of fact of all things, and occupy all the benches of industry and existing practice everywhere in the world. I would consider Health to be just the overflow of a human being's completeness; the safety-gush of praise and thankful- ness to God, for all powers used; for all faith, justified and momentaneously perpetuated. That is an expression of the highest good of the sound mind in the sound body. A man open to the skies ; a man open in the will, even as a voluntary heart can be open; and therefore, drawing upon that firmament of affectionate power, consciously inexhaustible. A man open to his own body, conscious there as we are not now conscious, of the instrumentality and enginery of his outer being; keenly missing whatever is absent from purpose, or shut and obstructed, or self-centred, or swerved from the goodness of the upper truth. A man open to his kind ; a truly social man ; and therefore now "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; " a man who is a conscious part of the body of humanity in this wicked world, OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 5 and on this suffering globe; a man who knows that all social diseases are his diseases, and that he is either infected with them, or a prisoner in his own house against them; a man who admits that any completeness in his position, comforts, or life, are, when he arrives at maturity, a charge against him while his brother and sister are lying helpless in his street, or at his door. In short, a man who, like his Master, knows that he must take upon himself the sins of the world, otherwise he is dead to society; society is dead in him ; and social corruption is in his veins. Fourthly, a man with all his mental faculties, and with all his heart, full, open, and exercised; an individual man, believing in himself as by God's grace good in himself; and therefore where his own character is concerned, self-asser- tive ; and peculiar* to the veriest tips of his powers; knowing well that there is a high law of order, and of instant organiza- tion, which will inevitably range God's freemen in his battal- ions, without preconcert, or coat cut to an external pattern. An individual man, therefore, who grandly adjoins his own social man by the laws of his creation, and flows into his loving bosom; and there loses «his limits in his human nature as a river is lost in the sea. We have then four men in us to be healthy, which four are one. First, there is the individual body, composed of many systems and organs, which have relations with, and capacitate us to exist in, the world. The health of the body we may for this time call Animal Health. Secondly, there is the indi- vidual mind in its union with the body; the fulness, power and connection of the two ; and the health of this compound unity we will call the Human Health, which ought to complete the animal health as a man inhabits his body. And thirdly, there is the Divine-Human Health, where a man has a sense of God 6 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. coextensive with his powers, consentaneous in end with his purposes, living in his life, inspiring in his aspirations, and burnino- and glowing in his affections. This is the health of Christ's religion. Fourthly, there is the Social Health, which is the ground and seedfield of all the rest; in which every man's body and being is as happy, or miserable, as good, or bad, as large, as weak, and as suffering as all humanity. Not one of these three healths, the Human, the Divine- Human, or the Social, can exist with any entirety in itself, any more than any of the walls of space, height, length, and breadth, can exist by themselves. In our present ideas, no doubt they exist separately; but something within lets us know that such ideas are comforts, but not truths; we coddle our- selves in them against the outer cold. To -the Human health without the Divine there is a great blackness which is continu- ally passing by, as it were the funeral of some alien high priest, and the king of terrors is its name; a sense of fear in the heart of power, and of instability in the deeps of affection. To the Human and the Divine without the Social, all men are ghosts trooping on to some city of refuge-in the clouds, carrying thither in airy but lasting hatreds the distinctions of the earth, and the war of classes and of creeds ; hoping against hope that the impossible " Thy kingdom come," may not be cheated there as here; and that our dice in heaven may have a fortunate throw at last. And again, if the Social health, after beino- enjoyed, and constituted, could be isolated from the Divine, individual selfishness would come forth imperiously soon, and the body of brotherly happiness would be dismembered, and even crumble away into ruin. In a word, God Almighty is the Founder and Finisher of lasting sanitary conditions ; but that great chancellor, the human mind ; that pretentious priest OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 7 the Christianity which limits perfection to the future state; and that potent monarch, enlightened self-interest, unless they open themselves, breast and body, to the Founder and Finisher, and become His servants, and each other's brethren, will never make us strong with enduring strength, let alone clean and kind and wholesome in all our being. In short, will never gain us the health of health, or keep us within it. Others, to whom our cause is dear, will doubtless dwell on useful details wrhich in knowledge and act your Society is in- tended to foster; but as I have been impressed to speak more of the spirit of things, more, indeed, to-day On the Connection of Public Health with Social Righteousness, I shall pass some- what slightly, but by no means slightingly, over the aspects, and prospects, of the animal or bodily health of all classes of society. With medicine and diet, and change of air and of climate, we labor assiduously to coax the animal spirits to come on and vitalize us so that we may live all our days. We build houses on the best models, and reform our habits as science and prudence require. In short, having the means, we make the best of ourselves, and of our poorer brethren too, and we are quite right in doing so; because, if there were no strong men and women in the world, carefully got up for power, the hio-her causes of health would have a bad chance of being pleaded: at all events, the arm of art and science would not be ready to their hand when at length they come down to us. But one thing, I think, must have struck us all; I mean, the want of universal adoption for all the best schemes; the small scale on which good appears to work; the little that is done, and that with present means can be done, towards the abate- ment of evils and sins, the elevation of the degraded, and the relief of the suffering. One set of persons aver that this is to 8 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. be expected, because we are not to look for heaven here. But Christ, in His Lord's Prayer, appears to me to be against these persons. Another class tell us, that the gradual education and elevation of the people, self-help, self-reliance and self-virtue becoming universal, is the means by which the ages will solve their problem, and a select species of healthy and happy indi- viduals will at length cover the globe. They say, with the force of some science, that Geology, in demonstrating millions of ages to the present time ; the structure of the existing planet built up piece by piece like a coral-reef, in scarcely conceivable epochs of endurance, — that Geology lies under our thoughts as a grand basis of patience and of waiting, and with a mate- rial impressiveness that no foolish hopes can contravene, dictates that the human development too may fairly stretch through uncounted periods of periods. Patience is good, and has its place; but patience with evil may degenerate into selfish ease, into sloth, and into palsy. Believing, as we do, in the New Testament, we want something more than this huge serpentine hope and faith engirdling endless time and space, and which you can never give up, only because there are so many of its worth- less backbones that you can never get to the end of it. We want something smaller ; something about the height and meas- ure of a man ; something of the stature of Jesus Christ; some extension, according to his promises, of his powers over nature and matter, over health and disease. One little Faith-eyed Hope, the size of a baby, even in a manger, has eternity in it, and is big enough to embrace the firmament. When we reco"1- uize one upright, compact, human, safe-standing, securely moving, loving, and radiant Hope, we shall perhaps require all the promises of Geological time to be more than trebled, in order to its incarnation in the development of the true species, OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 9 that is to say, the Divine Species of Man; but it will be well that as little of the epochs to come as possible, should be wasted even in our expectations, upon the present undivine dispensa- tion of sadness, suffering, and virtual despair. What new means, then, can be proposed to universalize the various movements which have the health and happiness of mankind for their aim ; so that the Ragged Schools shall attract all the rags of the world, and change them for the wardrobes of decorum; the Reformatories gather in, and rehabilitate, all the fallen creatures; and the Lodging-Houses of the new be- nevolence close as clean and comfortable homes round all pau- perism and sordidness of estate, and Philanthropy, commencing at the bottom, wash the feet of our common humanity, and forestall its lowest necessities forever? Can it be done? In God's name, and in Christ's name, I believe that it can. And if so, what are the means? In the first place, we must wait for the gifts of God, which gifts are His Men and Women competent to the work. That is obviously the first thing. With men and women as they are now, with their faith and hope, the change could never be effected; no, not though clear philosophies were at hand to point and to paint the certainties of the glorious future; not though science were to demonstrate it; not though reason were to indorse it; not though the human heart were to crave it with tears of blood. All this must be insufficient unless a new dawn of hope and faith come down from on high, and call, or constitute, before our eyes, the Leaders of a new day and an Inspirational Epoch. With the first cohort of such Leaders, the world, I believe, is now in travail. And what will be one characteristic of these men and these 10 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. women ? I predict that it will be a foregone Faith in the possi- bility of the work they are full of, in all its compass being accomplished in this world. A faith that all poverty, all dis- ease, all crime, all meanness, and all strife, will pass away forever from the fair face of this earth; and a faith level with certainty that they themselves are meant in a most important sense to help these things to pass. These will be the little boys and girls of the new state, in unknowing courage and unaccountable hope, the born prophets of the Divine Man- hood of the world. Obviously you must wait for the gifts of God; in hope and continuous prayer ; but still you must wait: but while you are thus waiting for them, you will find time full of eternity, and consequently just long enough to enable you to do all the other things that are needed. The time before the Messiah, says Renan, to the devout, who know the promises, is all full of the Messiah; and his unborn presence charges every faculty and every work from Abraham to Jesus. The fathers and mothers of the Ancient Church, says Swedenborg, had a deeper delight in family and posterity, because they knew that in their descent, in the fulness of time, the Lord was to be born. And so we also are the better and happier in action and in passion, in pos- sibility and in speed, above all, in love, for the consciousness that we are waiting for the chosen vessels of the Almighty. And now, as we do not see his irresistible Sanitary and Social Messengers yet, the Question is about our duties and lights, and what we are to do in the mean time ? that while the hands of our patience are religiously folded in our inner man, the hands of our labor may be rapid and workful in that lower place to which it has already pleased God to call us. To answer this question, we see, secondly, that whoso believes OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 11 in the possible and coming realization of the Gospel promise of righteousness and happiness and health on this earth, thereby becomes a member of A Social Church, intensely active in propagating his faith, and doing its works, whilst waiting for these messengers; who are to come, whether in, or out of, him- self, or herself, no woman, and no man can say. Already that faith lifts him indignantly, or better still, lovingly, out of, and away from, that hideous foul easiness with which hitherto per- haps he contemplated the present state; and closes his eyes to all the beauties, and his ears to all the melodies, which are chanted by the Court Poets of the Devil. He will taste no more of this fruit of the vine, until he drinks it new with all humanity in the kingdom of heaven; the kingdom which Christ himself prayed down to this earth, and there left it standing and shining forever in His own Life's Divine illustration. This Social Congregation, then, of free men and free women, bound together not by an intellectual belief, but by a living and perhaps externally unjustified faith, will embrace every co-worker in the same great field of sanitary and social welfare. Secu- larists and Popes, G. J. Holyoake and Pius the Ninth, may equally belong to it, each in his place, according to the intensity of his conviction that a new order of things shall come here, which will embrace mankind within its pale. No one will have authority to ask him where his faith comes from, provided it is going to the right place, the realm of the universal good. No one in this society will feel religious enough, or healthy enough, which is the same thing, to cast the first stone at his brother. And so there will be a new prospect of the right men being in the right places. It is to be expected that some of these men, the congregation, that is to say, the priesthood of the Social Church, will be 12 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. found among the accredited religious ministers of the day, and these, like lights upon a hill, will be radiant far and wide with Gospel-fire and Gospel-health, adding the Social Sense * of the Holy Scripture to the individual sense, and to the spiritual sense. A handful of such men will awaken poor Wealth out of his apoplexy, will rescue Rank from its derangement, will divorce Poverty from drunkenness, will disimprison Human Love from artful law and gaoler money; will proclaim and provide for the great necessities; and disabuse mankind of hypocritically ex- pecting the virtues that come after peace, to flow out of the breast of artifice and war. They will make the pulpit the great school-room of brotherly love, and the first rebuking-place of Social Sins : and the mere presence, or absence of men during their ministrations, will be the open mystery of the general confessional. The millionaire, poor fellow, could not be at * It was not perhaps generally known to my auditory that there are many distinct senses in the Holy Scripture, which by the Divine mercy are now being gradually opened. First there is the Natural Sense, which has been guarded by scholiasts and commentators in a wonderful way. All reverent criticism and scepticism tends to bring out the natural sense in its letter and lower parts; and disregarding its mysterious life, to reveal some of its intrinsic literal meaning, in the same way that the dissection of a dead body reveals the inward organs (dead however) which would be otherwise unknown. We know far more of the letter, because Strauss and Renan, and Colenso and Parker, have wrought upon it, and de/ivered their theories of its former life. The Internal Natural Sense, however, is concealed from them, because, by temperament, they deny its ghostly depths. But as I have just said, their night has brought out stars; for had they accepted that higher import, they could never have dissected the living letter. Secondly, there is the Spiritual Sense, which in its beginning was brought to light through Swedenborg, and published in his works, and especially in his Arcana Ccelestia and Apocalypse Revealed. Thirdly, there is the Celestial Sense, predicted by Swedenborg, and its evolution commenced through T. L. Harris, and published in his Arcana of Christianity. Fourthly, there is the Social Sense, first opened as a distinct sense, so far as I am aware, by D'Espinassous, of Nimes, in France. See his work, L'Oraison Dominicale, lately translated by Harriet E. Wilkinson, under the title, The Law of Life, shown in a Philosophical, Religious, and Social Study of the Lord's Prayer (Smith, Elder, and Co., 1864). The Social Sense, begun to be formally elicited in this beautiful little Treatise, teaches the extension of Gospel truths through all the relations of society; in short the Second Advent in the Social Man. Probably there are many other Senses but this series will give the reader some aper$u of what has been already given. OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 13 Church last Sunday because it was his own social post-mortem examination: he preferred in sackcloth and ashes to read the frightful "appearances" in the papers. And, to pursue as clear a narrative as ever lived, how will all this happen ? First, it will happen by the laws of light, spiritual-social light, which shows us what we are, and where we are. The Social Sense of the Word, once believed in, — and the whole wicked poverty of the world becomes charged upon us as a general sin. Like our great Atlas, Christ, each man, by this acknowledgment, bears the sins and diseases of the world, and is to blame for them, and is bound to the extent of his life's life and fortune, to set them right. For remember, he believes that they can be set right, and he continually prays it, and he is a part of the means for setting them right; and in this way he straps upon his back the huge pack of all woe and all destruction, and is faithfully to carry it until he dies. And his preacher, whether in him or out of him matters not, can always ask him Whether he has it on ? and Where he is with it? and What he is doing with it? Now there will soon be such persons, and such preachers, and they will ask these very questions, and the whole social state and motives will be laid bare by them with a rhetoric which has only to exist, to be awful. They will not be revolutionists, simply tossing irreverently about the dear packs and burdens of the world, but terrible consciences; with power to make men most unhappy until righteousness overtakes them; with power to smite the small quantity of selfish health which there now is, until its knees knock together, and in its extremity we cry out, "Lord, help us, or we perish." We may imagine by an instance, some of the first gross effects of The Social Preacher. For this purpose go with me 2 14 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. to Scotland, and from busy Glasgow, squalid with so much poverty, festering with so much disease, manful with such great industry, and towering from this base into the high Glasgow of speculation and of capital, —from that Glasgow pass over the Firth and the sea, to the Island of Arran, lying between the warm arms of the Gulf Stream, and sloping upwards from the sea into grand beauty of nature, with a helmet of peaks upon her head. I went over by a cheap boat with a large band of excursionists, and was surprised to find the village of Lamlash at which we touched so thin looking and inhospitable; the scale of building something like the pictures of Greenland. The people had to land, but on shore there was obviously no recep- tion for them. If the miracle of the loaves and fishes could have been repeated, here was a human desert fit to do it in. Not believing what I remember now to have heard, I did not understand it. Arrived at Brodick, I marked along the bay, right opposite the throbbing arterial Clyde, another skinny line of houses; and further on, nursed in the beautiful woods, the Duke of Hamilton's castle. I found on inquiry in the cottages which I visited in my walks, that the Dukes of Hamilton dis- courage the existence of men and women on the island; that they pull down many buildings of human souls in the interest of deer and game; that the broad carpeted slopes of Arran are as far as possible denied as health places to the well-to-do thousands, and to the toiling hundreds of thousands of poor smoky Glasgow; that no shops are allowed on Arran, except bakers' and bankers'; the women are never to buy their finery by inspection, excepting of some pedler's slender show; no sellers of books and periodicals for the men; few of the few houses allowed to take lodgers ; and these few, disallowed con- veniences, lest cookery should be comfortable, and lodoinw OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 15 should increase. In short, the whole island, a bare, bony court- yard of Brodick Castle, with just enough straight stewards to tend the personalty, and keep away men and women from the wide Selfhood's Wall, which everywhere faces the sea. More than these, whoever is there, is there by accident, and out of place. " Sir," said the Diabolus loci to me, " are you a grouse, or a red-deer ? " And, as I was neither, I heard him say again : "Then, begone!" On that island I gave up Christianity, to betake myself to Christ. For I saw that Christianity could not even film and skin this dreadful ulcer. Under its best ministrations in London and the country this line of dukes had not had their duty to the neighbor as a wray to heaven here, and therefore hereafter, placed before them. They had been allowed to sit in churches from time immemorial, yet had never been rebuked for perpetrating the most gigantic social ills; I will not say sins, because that implies knowledge which they had not. Instead of the Word of God being a flaming fire to terrify and to burn up bad authority, the pulpit and its word had become a wart upon the dukedom. The precepts of the Gospel, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," and, " Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you," not expounded personally to these great men, had no power to move their palsied affections towards their fellow-creatures. The castle had become its own neigh- bor, and all the life and meaning of the Word of God was preached to them in a castellated sense. The castellated, em- brasured, bastioned, portcullised, drawbridged, moated, and looped-holed-for-musquetry sense of the Holy Scripture ! This is one of the senses under which we are now living. Ah ! but there is a Cottage Sense, and God loves the poor; and the poor, when they are known and loved, will make the rich happy some 16 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. day. Until then, you and I must do our best to make the rich and the powerful unhappy, until every conscience is awakened, and every shoulder is at work in humble, hearty cooperation for breaking the first ground of poor justice and simple love. What has all this to do with public health ? Everything, as you shall see. The Health we are to consider to-day, is one of the wants of human beings ; and if the hand of power cancels innocent men and women from their birthplace, it voids the possibility of health in discharging its substance from the land. Where would public health be if some Ogre Emperor were to drive us all over the edge of the planet ? Our sanitary efforts would be at an end. Moreover, though the driven man exists elsewhere, perhaps in the other world, patricide, or the destruc- tion of his country, is a grievous breach in the integrity of his heart, and mars his wholeness every way. The feeling that the chieftain whose greatness towers like a god over his childhood, has rooted out his homestead to plant a covey of partridges in his place, is incompatible with human dignity, or human love. But again, though he be gone, the ground that bore him is denied its privilege, if it can support, and does not support, another man in his place ; another healthy person. Patriotism can inhabit every place, and is a precious prophecy, right against present climate, of A Universal Man. But, furthermore, when the banishment is done for a time, and men have decreased, and animals have increased, what is the public health of the permitted population which remains ? Let me remind you that a man's health, in a higher sense, depends upon the erectness of his brow, the fearlessness of his eye, the freedom of his mind and manners, the simple outspokenness of his mouth; the sense of honest right seconded by his position. But where can all these vessels of health be, when an irresponsible power makes OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 17 itself felt on every side, and either compresses the man into servility, or if his manhood retains itself, forces him into sullen- ness? Bad sanitary conditions these for British subjects, who have the consciousness of being born for something better. Then again the marriages there are necessarily contracted in irons, and the children are all born in irons, ready to be carried away if they are surplusage to the scrutineers of the castle. That also, as health depends greatly upon marriages and births, is a bad sanitary condition. What also shall we say of the fact, that the produce of the earth, which would support multitudes on that beautiful island, is mostly exchanged for heather to feed deer and grouse ; and that a girdle of noble towns which would rise around the coast as suburbs of Glasgow and the adjacent cities, is forbidden to exist; probably a hundred thousand fresh beings are stopped off' from the sap and current of the human tree by the handgrip which here prevents its stem from expand- ing. Can you palliate that abolition of a hundred thousand healths, on the major plea that it is only a prevention of a hun- dred thousand lives ? And then, the seigneur himself! Now do you not believe and know that any race is mulcted of its choicest happiness, and therefore of its best health, by indulging in the sad majesty and luxury of loveless possession? Every one has within him, and revealed to him sometimes, an ideal of what he might be. It is the very spirit and true person of our conscience. It tends always to square us with our circumstances ; to make our duties coextensive with our opportunities ; or it conjures us to abdicate from the midst of powers whose beneficence we are incompetent to fulfil. The grandest health streams through this part of us, and arrives in our minds, and in our bodies, in exact proportion to the fidelity of our lives. This is the highest social public 2* lg OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. health. One mark of it is the rapid energy with which all that pertains to the good of others is administered and done. A man in the bloom of that health would make Arran into an Eden in three years; he would evolve an intellect, keen and sovereign for his ends, out of the realized Sermon on the Mount - and be the leader of a race, strong, earnest, and multitudinous ; and the, present days of shame and annihilation would be for; gotten in the homesteads, and towns, and villages, of a free, wealthy and healthy people. And the Great Man himself would be lower than the lowest, and higher than the highest of them. And do you think that all this evident possibility, announced and prophesied by the sometime conscience, and killed in the body of the property, does not even now haunt like an avenging ghost every unfulfilling proprietor; and hunt him out into his own manless heather, and manage his sports, and drug his feasts, so that he shall not come across his own grave, or hear the dirges over his own murdered joys ? For observe, and this is an important part of the great health, any faculty we have that we keep without a function, first wails, and then becomes withered and sometimes diseased, and even malignantly diseased ; and sometimes dies ; and the whole body, individual and corporate, suffers from carrying about in it, to bed and board, to business and pleasure, to prayer and work, this workhouse, or lazar-house, or it may be churchyard, of effete, or vicious, or cadaverous organs. Look at a man who has lost his country, a compulsory exile, and observe how hard it is for him to live and work with the affection of patriotism always bleeding and groaning within him. Look at a woman whose heart has been broken, and who has to take her part in work; her bravery, often immense, cannot compel her from dire abstraction, or make the day other than a burden on despair. OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 19 It would be easy to fill a long hour with this subject alone ; but as yet the human mind is in no mood for knowing the effects wThich flow out, and concrete themselves, perhaps afar off, from the wants and hungers, the starvations and disappointments, the agonies and suicides, of the God-given powers of the natural man. Suffice it to say that they generate a good many of our amusements, and no small portion of our crimes. They keep huge masses always red for revolutions, ever confounding change with hope. They make the crust of universal artifice, and transplant men and women away from their true life out- wards and ever outwards, until we are all remade by ourselves of dead matter and time. And what is to be the cure? We have now wandered a long way from our Social Preacher, and begin to feel the want of him; and a first lesson he has to teach us, is clean against the self-help which so many believe in. When people are sunk down, sunk in masses, sunk from the decay of the fair humanities within them, earthed in the burrows of long ancestral animal habitudes, whether dukes or paupers, they cannot help themselves into their former state. We all need an external Saviour; and every fallen state has its own need of some Saviour in his image; that is to say, we need men and women, burning and shining, who are not diseased, not decayed, not dead, but vital, godly, disinterested, in those exact parts and powers where their poor brethren suffer. This is the business of a Church; and, if the Church does it not, others, in God's name, have to do it. At first, perhaps, a small band, and uninfluential; excepting that faith and fire are there. But they are, and proclaim, A-New Conscience in the human race. And themselves wanting nothing from their call- ing but decent life, they arraign private property, private family, and all the most private rights, at the bar of the tribunal, I will 20 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. say of Christ. If I knew any other name under heaven to com- prehend more, or to accuse less, I would name it; but I do not. Private property and family will soon know if they will accept the regeneration, that they have nothing to fear from these inno- vators ; but everything, even all wealth and stability, to gain. They will be listened to, perhaps by the Lord of Arran, — or perhaps aot; but they will be listened to; and their numbers will increase. The text of Arran has been, " The earth is the landlord's, and the emptiness thereof." But at length, possibly soon, some sense of property in some good proprietor, will be fired by the Gospel-Heart: "The Earth is the Lord's, and the Fulness thereof; " and he is the tenant of that Lord, and must be in part the fulness; though teeming thousands under him will be needful for the Fulness, if his be a large estate. Then he and his family will be stewards, not of the people, —there is nothing democratic in this commonwealth, — but of the Most Hiffh; and all means will be set to work to make the best of the human souls who are upon the face of that Lord's ground. Especially every babe that is born will be born on a level with the supremest rights, and will be led easily, with no knowledge of what we are now in, to the security of the new state. The fire that will burn down the old wretchedness, and dirtiness, and grossness, and wickedness of the poor, will not come out of the pale horny eyes of the lamp of education; that at the best only teaches, and teaches what some men know; but this will be the fire of example; the example of a disinterestedness at which even the astute malice of poverty cannot cavil; the example of those in high station, determined to know no more of height until they can have it newly with their brethren in the kingdom of their Father; the fire and light that no man knows until they are revealed to him afterwards in the blessed issues OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 21 of the life. The example, you see, will elevate as nothing else can. Imagine to yourselves the long-unknowing rustics on some outlying property, hearing that the Great Landlord was coming down upon them with a message of new life and joy ; and that they and their little children, and their sons and daugh- ters, and their aged ones, were all going to be housed, they and their heirs, female and male, forever, in honor and health as beseems human beings, upon the Lord's estate. That the great man whom they had hitherto known chiefly by his absence in London, or in Italy; by his game preserving, his hunting, his select parties at the castle, by the restoration of the Church full of grim effigies of ancestors in all the pride of stained window- hood, and by the dash of his equipages through his villages, like the Erl-king through the terrified night — that that great man had found three new title-deeds to all his properties ; three eternal title-deeds; and that besides leasehold, and copyhold, and freehold, they are inalienably his also in Conscience-hold, in Love-hold, and in Christ-hold. Imagine the health and vitality of that man and his blessed family; imagine their wealth; imagine the population that will spring up under them. Im- agine the stability of their state. Imagine the invasion of such an island as this ; nothing but the apostle of a higher love and lio-ht that all would welcome will ever find a creek in its close- set human cliffs. Imagine the intellect that will radiate from this conscience; and the skilled industry that will move upon the fields of the estate. Observe that all industry proceeds hitherto from some kind of attraction, even if it be only the attraction men have to keep life from starvation; but when the mind is fired to higher possibilities, the attraction becomes easier, — the industry greater; and when once the nobler life, in perpetuity, is seen to be possible for every family, industry 22 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. must be intense compared to anything that has yet been seen on the planet. And as to intellect, it also is always in its first springs a close ally if not a ray of conscience; however much it may afterwards err. The new intellect of physical science is nothing but a more conscientious study of the facts of nature ; a putting aside of selfish pretensions to know things we do not know; and to dogmatize over others ; in short, man's conscience instead of his conceit, face to face with the laws of nature. And can we doubt that the intellect of Social Science, and of the grand Sanitary Science which we want, is to come out of the awakened conscience of those who have the power to do the good? This is the answer to any one who asks, How shall these things be? — viz., they shall be by extension of primeval Christ in and through the world; by individuals determined for right- eousness. But no man can predict what successions of form they will take. The social invention, the sanitary invention of next year, is as much beyond our powers of prophecy as the chemical discovery of next year, or the mechanical invention. But it is plain to see that a new light and fire of conscience, and a spirit working accordingly, are the sun-springs of the experimentation that will conduct mankind into healthy socie- tary life. The will and the way are joined together. And we may well have faith that a new philanthropy, which believes its mission pre-ordained to extend to all men, will have ways and means put into its head and into its hands which cannot be dreamed of until that Incarnate Hope leaps forth. But we will say that it is produced in one or two noble and powerful men ; in one or two leaders, Christ's dukes. Can it fail to extend? Be assured that a few men of that order would, let me say will, not revolutionize, but reconstruct Social Europe, OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 23 while political Europe will vanish without anybody knowing when or how it goes out. Political Europe is like sanitary sci- ence ; a few drains laid down to stave off immediate fever from the best houses; a few model lodgings built and occupied by people who were tolerably comfortable before, but never by the very poor ; a few tracts circulated to instruct the cultured arti- sans ; a better water supply for those who will wash ; in short, a trim Oasis in the great desert of human pauperism, indignity, and crime. And so of our political estate. It is a holding together by artificial laws of those remainders of human nature which are not too large for the present machinery; the desires, affections, aspirations which can be suffered by the Traditional State. But all inside it is flaming fire consuming the individual, and leaving society a mere crust; and beyond it is a sea of men and women who, excepting when they are in prison, are only included geographically in the state. This is the Europe which will pass away as Social Sanitary Science advances; killed into new life by the example at first of a few men who believe the fulfilment of the very Gospel here to be the tenure upon which they and their families hold all they have. The political economy which rays out from the present con- science, will also die under the sunny beams of The New Con- science. Its place will no more be found. And in passing away it will take mankind out of as big a web of excuses and pretexts for social sin, as ever in a few short years was woven by the fiends. For what is it, and what has it done ? Observe, I am not speaking of the study of those great natural laws which regulate the commerce of nations, and which, rightly obeyed, tend to the mutual benefit of all, and are an important substratum to the harmonic development of the world. But I allude to the apothegms and axioms which, from the pulpit of 24 OUR SOCL\L HEALTH. political economy, are uttered by worldly*greed. Such is that famous maxim, of " buying in the cheapest market, and selling in the dearest;" which, for aught I know, is sometimes true, as a law of nature, applied by nature, gathered in a large heart after the facts, in the general field of commerce and trade : but applied by one man to another, apart from love, and before the facts, is Brigandage issuing direct from the den of the lust of greed. The Gospel within you ought often to make you buy in the dearest market, and sell in the cheapest, if you would pre- serve your neighbor's health and life. I don't mean exception- ally, but permanently do it; and make your account of doing it. I will give an instance. One day I was in Essex, not far from Colchester ; and I vis- ited a poor cottager whose wife was dying of consumption, and his child of atrophy; or rather, both had that many-named disease, starvation. Their hovel was on the ground, and invaded by stenches from bad drainage, which the landlord exhibited great disinclination to rectify. There were two cottages, and out of those two, in no long time, nine children had died. The man and wife and family whom I saw had eight shillings a week wages. If I recollect right, he was a brickmaker. A clergy- man in the neighborhood, perhaps unbeneficed, made bricks, and he allowed those wages. Another employer in the village raised his to ten shillings a week; and then the men of the first employer asked him likewise for the same. He said, "No; if you are not satisfied, you may go elsewhere." And so the plat- ter and bowl of starvation went round: and so they go round still. I myself saw the eight-shilling employer at church, where I heard a sermon; but the preacher never arraigned the clerical brickmaker from one end to the other of the discourse. He arraigned no social evil; and in that neighborhood of eio-ht OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 25 shillings a week in foul hovels for the persons we call husbands and wives and sons and daughters and little children, he expati- ated on the earliest beginning of things in the Mosaic record. He could not have got farther from his work; which was, to rouse the conscience, to point the duty, to rebuke the habitual sin; the more traditional, habitual and unacknowledged, the more to rebuke it: not the sin of the world, but the sin of that particular village; beginning with the upper sins, and going down to the lower ones ; and making the non-fulfilment of the Gospel conditions the measure of the Communion of Sins. Then the pulpit would have been occupied by an incarnation of the words : " Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you;" and, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." And these words would have begun to set the parish in order. The clergyman, full of the starving laborers, would have asked the brickmaker from the pulpit if he could not give more than eight shillings a week to this ever-dying family. If he could not, he would have asked the congregation to resolve itself into a con- stituency, and to elect a parliament, under the Lord Christ, and to sit in permanence upon the mortal condition of the parish. And when that parish, led on by The Eight Man, does this, and when all the other parishes in the land do the same, and they have to do it, the first conditions for solving the social problems will arise; the first conditions for the universal social health. Charity will have its work in the mean time, and has it now; but gifts are of doubtful good, though sometimes inevitable; but the chief gift and charity that is wanted always is that universal kind called Righteousness. These Parishes, thus met,—to pursue them for a moment, __will be Municipal Institutions worth having; little common- wealths of love and its light, coalescing into a New England, 3 26 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. and pointing to a new metropolis, in the faithful kingdom of the future. But to avoid beim? dazzled with the fact that even this small beginning would inaugurate, look at the zealous awa- kened villages and hamlets of Essex, of Buckinghamshire, of Dorsetshire, or of Norfolk, as the constituencies of a new parliament, carrying their life into Her Majesty's Palace of Westminster. As the vine-and-corn-promotifig lava of their rills of love, coming from hill after hill of rural brotherliness, becomes confluent and again confluent, and pours itself into the Senate-Sea of the proper national men, what will be the devo- tion, and what the uplifting, and what the love-intellect of the true Chieftains of the Country? As against the material diffi- culties of this lower world, what will be their resources ? If on any day the love of the commonweal, in even that fiery Forum, does not flow with inspirations, the spirit of prayer will descend among them, and the Lord Chancellor, or the Prime Minister, or the Attorney-General, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Bright or Mr. Gladstone, — the Divinely-appointed Chap- lain of the hour, — on the knees of the whole house — Jew or Christian, it matters not — will descend into a deeper humility, and ask in faith, and await in patience, a message from the King of Kings. Here will begin the true experiments of pol- ity, if I may use an understood phrase, the Baconian age of Righteousness. Nothing less than this can follow from the commencement of the social health or godliness of these Islands, or of any other islands. It follows by the laws of Spiritual Fire, which is catching. It goes from one pulpit, one inspired man, to the others who are his neighbors, and there it becomes a visible and spoken flame. It goes from one body of God's Tenantry to another, and the social voice is heard, and the social beauty seen, as the thunder plays and the lightning blossoms in OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 27 the fertile summer heavens. It has local journals whose ban- ners over it are Love. It catches grimy towns, and it shouts its Hosannas in their streets, and they stand up in massive white- ness, clean in the furnace of these redeeming affections; and point with hands imploring over our clouds to the metropolitan life which is their heart. And then comes the Second Great Fire of London ; the great social, sanitary, celestial fire; which is all reconstructive ; and burns out the social plagues. I cannot describe it, though I clearly see its reflection in the spiritual skies all roofed with the faces and heads of the long-expectant past; but it is a fire observed by the dwellers on five continents, and it warms the Earth to her Poles : and every devout, busy, building Flame of it has a tongue which says : " The poor shall never cease from the land :" the interpretation of which is, that the Infinite Giver always will have us consider ourselves poor, in comparison with what shall be, and what He has yet to give. Yet after this again I say, for it is important to repeat it, Do not ask me how to settle social problems. I tell you plainly it is no privilege of ours to foreknow even the first and the least of the unrollings of Providence through the awakening of the Social Conscience: but we can see with the eye of faith that that awakening will be the source of our light and of our fire, and that the difficulties will be far less than they now seem when we socially take upon ourselves the yoke of Him whose " yoke is easy and whose burden is light." We shall then at once have it opened to us, that Political Economy has many high Relations. When it is purged of huck- stering economy, which is its present cruel disease, it will have intercourse with superior beings of its own order whose exist- ence it now denies. With Social Economy, including the economy of tens of thousands of infants, who are now thrown 28 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. away as the very offal of our poverty. With Ecclesiastical Economy, taking care of every Gospel precept on its way down into practical life and realization, and seeing to it that they do not fall among the thorns of worldliness, and so come to nought. With Mental Economy, cementing our individual minds with the social and brotherly mind everywhere; and healing the breach between our private and our public understandings of good. With Heavenly Economy, increasing and garnering heart-happiness from the service of the brother; from the recog- nition of his happiness and health and wealth — of his good, as our own. We shall also find that the higher of these economies can always safely, usefully, profitably, yea, most economically, enter, inspire, and to any extent modify, the straight precepts of the lowest, and the lower.. In short, that the higher relatively to the lower, and in the lower, can always do miracles. As the world becomes better, the more you give, the more you must get. A duke's all, given with the wise love equal to the occasion, would make such a duke of him that the world's fortunes would be at his feet. The good Garibaldi is an instance of this. Who but he is The King of Europe ? And why, but because he wants no crown, and never will have one? because he is what never Caesar was, a real and not a sham instance of JVblo coronari? It is just these men that want nothing but righteousness, that alone can have, and in the long run, on this redeemed earth must have all things. What becomes of any lesser economy with this Divine Source of wealth and property to draw upon,__this bank of love; this stable ocean of gold ? We need not be afraid that the sun will go out, or that the infinite principles which create the world, can ruin society, or do aught else in any hands than divinely perpetuate its creation. OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 29 This is not Socialism, nor is it Democracy; but it is a proc- lamation of faith in the reality of holy words which we utter every day; an acknowledgment of the application of the " good tidings of great joy," to rich and poor, great and small, noble and simple; a practical admission of the Ownership of Christ in all property and nature. It gives to no man and to no par- liament a right to take our property away from us; but from faith and conscience downwards it gives all voluntarily to Christ. It says to no man, " You shall not enjoy ten thousand a year; it is too much for one man to have;" or even, " You shall not possess ten million." It attempts no external sumptuary or agrarian laws. It does indeed proclaim, with a voice sonorous through us all, that there are agrarian and sumptuary laws radi- ating from the Gospel, to be received by the conscience, and gradually, as the understanding of them is evolved, to be accepted by the will, and carried out in new Gospel relations all over the earth between man and man. But for these it employs no out- ward force, and relies upon no external legislation. But if the thing we proclaim to-day is not democracy, or social- ism, so also it is not Utopia. Utopia means a beau ideal in plan and in place; a pattern from the imagination of genius of a new society. The Emperor of the French has hit Utopia hard with the sword of the final sentence of his last great speech ; and all the world for some ages has made a football of poor Utopia. I can by no means come to her rescue. Dream out anything beforehand ; fix the letter of it; make it authori- tative ; leave it to your heirs male, your intellects, forever; settle a plan of it; and put a check-taker at the door of the plan, and you have your Utopia; and I believe that all the great institutions of the world, so far as they are fixed by men, are just such Utopias. France at present is Napoleon's Utopia, 30 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. though it is the purgatory of the liberty of the French. For one man's Utopia may be another man's most infernal regions. Moreover, Utopias are the most easy things possible to realize, though they have the malady of not lasting, and of never satis- fying. But there is another eu in the consideration; a cu of which eutopia is the figment: there is Eiayyehov, in Latin evan- gelism, in English evangel; good tidings, — the Gospel. This is the spirit of all progress and of all plan, and this gives life. And what I want to hope is, that our good Emperor does not suppose that when he has dismissed Utopia, the fire of nations is put out; for I see clearly that in Evangel is a furnace, and round it is a glory, which will be the life and light of future states. Utopia indeed is the fire of dynasties, but Evangel is the Liberty-Fire of Christ. " Utopia," says our Caesar truly, M is to welfare what illusion is to truth." And we add : " Evan- gel is to welfare what God is to truth; the very life, and sub- stance, and soul of it." And this point is worth your noticing; lest the very greatness of the health of the views which the sim- ple Gospel opens, should be employed, imperially, or otherwise, to stigmatize its contingent promises as impossible, because Utopian. Whereas history proves that it is the parallelograms and constitutions and despotisms that we geniuses make that are Utopian; but this does not apply to the great things of God. They, on the other hand, are the ultimate laws and highest facts of nature, and the sole conditions of everlastingness, which is the final test of success. Again you say, What has the stream of thought now to do with human health ? They tell us that in America, " since the beginning of their war, there has been a remarkable decrease in cases of insanity in the female sex; which is attributed to the various charitable OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 31 and benevolent operations necessitated by the war; these having excited the sympathies and received the support of women." And do we not see, that in the war which I have sketched out to you to-day, a war against all the wretched Utopias in which we now acquiesce, against poverty, disease, indignity, separa- tion of classes, social hatred, strikes, lockouts, rich-man's-pov- erty, and rich-man's-misery; against the severance of the Gospel from the Church, of Christ from Christianity, and of the earth from heaven, — do we not see tnat in this war, every soldier- man and soldier-woman who enlists, will feel a resource and a glow of health, a right to live and die, a right to be loved and to love, which will crowd every day with glorious works ; which will kill the thought that maddens, and fill the void which despairs; and give us to taste of that peace which is the sweet- ness of the healing of the nations ? Other wars are toward death, but in this crusade, the war is against death. Want and hatred and gaunt crime are the only dead on its battle-fields. The longer its battles last, the more populous are the combat- ants, the more rosy with human kindness, the more radiant with human love. One such war would pay off the national debt. After one such war, if it only lasted three years,—though when once fairly begun it will last forever, — Mr. Gladstone's Budget would announce a surplus that would do all impossible things; if indeed Mr. Gladstone and those around him had not previously received new offices which are too high for us to know. But who can prophesy the effects of the Holy War? It follows no human plan. Genius hath not seen, nor hath it entered into the inmost dramatic heart to conceive it. Shakspeare can paint the world as it is; but'Christ alone can portray His future. The simplest words best suit our faithful ignorance of the infinite issues of His good. 32 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. But we can see in this epoch of the world's quickening, when all through invention and genius and social movement and indi- vidual thought, and above all, through events, something por- tends, that we must either accept new conditions, and move into their orbit, or that we shall be folded away, and disappear, per- haps not quietly. For my part I do not think that our beloved country will lose her post, because I believe she will change, not merely politically, but in heart and life, and become an abode of Righteousness. She is a rock, but the Rock of Ages is stronger than she is. -Must and shall reign as currents of power in her sinewy mind and sturdy frame; they come with individual and family and traditional imperiousness from her proud affections; they are jealous of the least interference, and greedy of great extension; but ought, duty to God and man, has only to open the eyes of the heart, and a deeper and a holy must and shall can enter the estates of the social realm; trans- form the lust of power into the love of power, the terrestrial into the celestial Eros ; break up mean satisfaction with self and kindred of the body, and render every family affluent with humanitary life; inflame greed with a clean appetite for doing human uses ; and make every Englishman's home, his Shekinah. Look at Japan, where I am afraid at present we cannot have such hope. The mere fact that a higher civilization has touched it, and that it must accept, for weal or woe, the conditions of an intercourse with that higher thing on the higher terms, amounts probably in no long period to the passing away of a civilization and a social state several thousand years old. No matter how founded the families, how settled the classes, how beautiful the arts, and how meritorious the industries, how imi- tative the genius, how receptive the mind to mechanical improve- ments, and all learning which decorates themselves; no matter OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 33 that all Japan is a castle, and the country a vast and proud conglomeration of feudal sovereignties; no matter that religion and the state are there crystallized under their feet and vaulted over their heads, and that we can only see them far in through the glass-covering of their own powerful peculiarities; no mat- ter all this, — if they cannot comport themselves according to our common ideas of honesty, humanity, and openness, their present life must pass away; that is to say, be transformed according to the new pattern which is brought to them from the East and from the West. A new pattern also is brought to us; it was brought to us eighteen hundred and sixty-five years ago ; its Armada set sail in Christ then; and we have heard reports of it, and been warned by those reports, in that telegraphic house called the Christian Church; it has touched at the vari- ous outlying coasts of our heathen hearts and loves; it has touched at the great Cape of Selfish Hope, at empire, clanship, law, medicine, property, church, state, intellect, philosophy; at the happy islands of genius; and at the mines of science; at the tropical archipelagoes of love; and in touching, it has left a message, or a rebuke, with the governor and in the archives of each; but already the first vessel of that fleet has spoken the lio-ht-towers of quite new perceptions, and the pilots of New Conscience Head have boarded her; and the fleet is going right on, by its own maritime law, and not by human sufferance; and henceforth, we must receive, and we must transform; for that fleet contains the long-journeying Ambassador, of unknown person, perhaps himself the King of kings and Lord of lords; and the time has come, and the cardinal place is reached, and eighteen hundred years of religious rumor have vanished in a moment, and we are practically face to face, in the metropolis of the human spirit and heart, in our own most awful wants, 34 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. not now with the Man of Sorrows, but with the Omnipotence of His Second Gospel Age. Do not believe that what is called " geological time " will be given us to change our social hearts. For our development from monads, mollusks, or even gorillas, geological time seems to me to be too short; for we want a distance further than pos- sible between us and our apes ; but for the transmutation of our societies into the Divine Image, since this depends upon the free will, and is most comprehensible and unmystical, it is quite evident that it can be commenced at once; and may be de- manded of us as a nation, in a moment. True, one does not see where the force or the Attila is to come from that shall break us up if we are unyielding and finally disobedient; but neither did India, nor China, nor Japan know this, but covered their martial bodies against us with magnificent bucklers of contempt; and yet they were virtually opened, and virtually lie now at the feet of destruction. And we, in relation to the unknown nation of all humanity, to our unknown poor, to the unknown King who cares for them; to the heaven where He lives, and the God who He is ; to His unknown armament; to the resources of Him who said in that once early day which is now our day, that He had twelve legions if He would but ask for them, — and even in this private room He may have demanded them now; —we, I say, are not more impregnable to a Divine Inva- der, and an unforeseen catastrophe, than are China or Japan to the forces of the West. Nevertheless, we can change, we can change rapidly; and if we do, then our Conqueror is our Redeemer. In conclusion, let me express the warmest sympathy with what is termed Social Science, of which sanitary science is a comprehensive branch. Our world may be said to lie between OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 35 Science and Faith; faith is the life, and science is the way; and conscious faculty involving belief is the private mind which we are to use and not abuse, to open and not shut, as our own. So that without science we have no way, and without faith we have no inspiration, and without beliefs we have no minds. Social Science then is a material preparation for a new social state. And it embraces all the sciences over again in a human application. Especially it embraces physiology as underlying society, but requiring to be opened up, to yield it the waters of Healthy Truth. I have not time for much here; but to give one instance, we have vast anathemas thundered against the celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy; and I believe with all reason ; but social science will teach us (and nothing else can do it with the proper coldness ; for the frigid zone of science is of sweet use sometimes as a talking place) that the celibacy of the laity of all churches is in the same condemnation; the celibacy of both sexes; and that many an alliance is the worst kind of celibacy; that late marriages are a terrible celibacy; also that at present a vast realm of society is a monastery covertly communicating with a nunnery by means of very wretched vaults. Social Science will decorously show us, that plain speaking, open honesty, not the present Japanese system of isolating and fortifying mischief, are possible on these sub- jects ; and that the sooner they come the better; and further, that legislation must consider whether it will act afresh, or give up contriving and acting, in this field, altogether. And now a word about material London. I have great sanitary hopes arising out of the rising and swelling current of public enterprise. What babies we were in our power of lifting matter in the last age ! We had traditions of the great wall of China, of the Pyramids, and of the aqueducts of the Roman 36 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. times ; and modern fortification too had a public largeness ; but our English schemes for cities and the metropolitan places of mankind were poor and timorous. Now, however, railway- works, railway-capitals, and railway-genius, arising from small beginnings, tower like vast figures over the land. We are going to be mighty in this direction, because, among better rea- sons, we believe it is possible to be mighty. And two things are manifest: first, that true public convenience pays for even a fabulous outlay of money; and secondly, that by the good sense of this nation, tile same convenience, in short, the com- mon weal, is allowed to displace, with due remuneration, pri- vate interest to a yearly increasing amount. These are grand bases for civic reconstruction, and for all sanitary efforts. Con- sequently, we have much to hope from a race of gifted Archi- tects and Engineers, probably already more than in their teens, who shall be the square and the cube of the power that the present great men exercise and are; men who shall be born to dandle London in their arms as easily as the architectural nurses now can take up a palace, or a workhouse. For that is what we want done ; and I am very sure that if sanitary metropoli- tan plans, embracing large districts, and embodying the prin- ciple that the poorest industrious man ought to be as cleanly and healthily housed as the richest; that he cannot help himself to do this, but that architectonic capital can profitably help him; that association of dwellings, not hovel-wise, but palace-wise, is the means; I say, I am very sure that if such plans on such principles were propounded, they would, after due ventilation and public awakening, meet the approbation of our rulers, would convert property to confidence, and would reconstruct London upon a scale which would show that Caring for Man, rich and poor, is the foundation-form of a greater architecture OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. 37 than has ever yet been exhibited. I do not contemplate in- creasing luxury, but rather that all classes shall cancel luxury, in favor of lasting comfort, health, happy action, and the sense of a constant life; for luxury, whether that of the rich or poor, isolates and enselfs us ; but these latter things are the material ground of our brotherhood. And it does seem to me that this big London, so wondrous and so ungainly, so perishable in its materials, so rich, so benevolent, and so central,—this poor black statue on the pinnacle of the planetary seas, is in just the humble condition to be laid hold of by great and good ideas, and to allow itself to be 'clothed in the seemly garments of a humanitary renovation. There is a City to come, the Wall of which is " the Measure of a Man." Many of our walls are too limited for that to apply; indeed I know of no walls yet which are the measure of a true man ; not even the ribs of any throbbing heart. The walls of the lowest are the measure of animal want and pain and cold and breathlessness ; most inhuman. The walls of the best are the measure of a comfort and of a stateliness uncom- fortable and unstately, because outside of them is the bad cli- mate of degradation and of woe; and that comes through the thickest worldly stuccos, just as an east wind finds us in our very beds. There is then to be a new compass, a new sur- rounding, a new freedom, a new bosom, a new wall for all men; and "The Measure of a Man" is the Divine designation of it. What a royal palace, what a breast of love, lies in those words ! Furthermore, the public works which we are now praying to see done will want so many men to execute them — such vast industrial armies — that when we get a little into the new day, the question of population will be reversed, and the families of the poor will be choice to all men, instead of cheap and cast- 3 38 OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. away. It will then be found that every family is too small; that men and women are the veriest wealth of the country, and that you cannot get enough of them. It will be found that you cannot sufficiently encourage marriages, and bless the loins of nations ; that the womb of time means Divine tenderness; that you cannot carefully enough cherish infant life; that you can- not be liberal enough, or brotherly enough, to the laboring man ; because in very polity the world-work to be done increases in love, and multiplies in extent, faster than families can follow. Oh! then, how we shall look back with astonishment of pity at the eight shillings a-week of the Essex agricultural laborer, and no way out of it; at the cradle feeding the ravenous little coffins; at desolated Arran and suffocating Glasgow; and all these disgraces of the past! And now, Ladies of the Sanitary Association, God speed, and Fare you well 1 LITTLE, BROWN & CO., 110 "Washington Street, Boston, Have in Press, and will publish immediately, THE LIFE AND SPEECHES OF ANDREW JOHNSON, President of the United States, EDITED BY FRANK MOORE. Crown 8vo. $2.00. . . . With fine Portrait by H. "W. Smith. This edition is published with the sanction and consent of the President. Among others, the volume will contain the following Speeches : — On the Veto Power, delivered in the House of Kepresentatives of the United States, August 2, 1842. On the Homestead Bill, delivered in the Senate of the United States, May 20,1858. On the Constitutionality and Rightfulness of Secession, delivered in the Senate, December 18 and 19, 1860. On the State of the Union, delivered in the Senate, February 5 and 6,1861. Reply to Senator Lane of Oregon, delivered in the Senate, March 2, 1861. Speech at Cincinnati, Ohio, June 20, 1861. On the War for the Union, delivered in the United States Senate, July 27,1861. On the Proposed Expulsion of Mr. Jesse B. Bright, January 31, 1862. Appeal to the People of Tennessee, March 18, 1862. Speech to the Colored People of Nashville, Tenn., 1864. JOHN BRIGHT OH THE AMERICAN QUESTION. THE SPEECHES OE JOHN BRIGHT, M.P., OCT THE ATHHHICHN QUESTION. WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION, By WR JUSTUS. MOOEB. Crown 8vo. $2.00......With fine Portrait by Mitchie. These Speeches were specially prepared and revised by Mr. Bright. They are as follows : — Speech at a Meeting at Rochdale, August 1, 1861. Speech at a Dinner at Rochdale, December 4, 1861. Speech at Birmingham, December 18, 1862. Speech on Slavery and Secession, delivered at Rochdale, February 3 1863. The Struggle in America in relation to the Workingmen of Bntain; Address at St. James Hall, London, March 26,1863. • „ ,M„ Speech at the London Tavern, before the Emancipation Society, June 16,1863. Speech in the House of Commons, on Mr. Roebuck's motion for Recognition of the Southern Confederacy, June 30, 1863. ^ Speech at a Meeting at Rochdale, November 24,1863 a ™CT »t this Town Hall. Birmingham, January 2b, 18b4. Speech on the CA^fAN Fortifications, delivered in House of Commons, March 23,1865. 1ST E W BOOKS LATELY PUBLISHED BY TICKNOR & FIELDS, BOSTON. Letters to Various Persons. By Henry D. Thoreau. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50. National Lyrics. By John G. Whittier. Illustrated. Paper, 50 cents. Alfred Hagart's Household. By Alexander Smith, author of " A Life-Drama," &'c. 1 vol. |16mo. Paper, 75 cents; cloth, $1.00. Essays in Criticism. By Matthew Arnold. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.75. Poems. By Alfred Tennyson. Farringford Edition. With four fine Steel Engravings. 2 vols. $5.00. Songs for all Seasons. By Alfred Tennyson. Illustrated. Paper, 50 cents. A Historical View of the American Revolution. By Prof. George W. Greene. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50. Household Poems. By Henry W. Longfellow. Illustrated. Paper, 50 cents. Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson, second series. 1 vol. 12mo. $1.75. Skirmishes and Sketches. By Gail Hamilton. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.75. In Press, AND TO BE PUBLISHED DURING SEPTEMBER. Recollections of Seventy Years. By Mrs. John Farrar. Lyrics of Life. By Robert Browning. Life and Letters of Rev. F. W. Robertson. Atalanta in Calydon. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. Hesperus. By Jean Paul Friederich Kichter. Poems. By Henry Howard Brownell. New and complete edition. $3?" Any of the above books -will be sent, post-paid, to any address, on receipt of the advertised price, by the publishers, TICKNOK & FIELDS, Boston. OUR SOCIAL HEALTH. A DISCOURSE DELIVERED BEFORE THE LONDON "LADIES' SANITARY ASSOCIATION," FEBRUARY 28, ■ 18G5. BY GARTH WILKINSON, M.D. THY KINGDOM COME, THY WILL BE DONE, AS IX HEAVEN, EVEN SO UPON THE EARTn. BOSTON: S. WELLES CONE. NEW YORK: HURD & HOUGHTON. PHILADELPHIA: J. 8. CLAXTON. CINCINNATI: R. CLARKE & CO. CHICAGO : J. E. WALSH & CO. 1865. Twenty-fice Cents. HORACE MA-ISTIST. 11 No single name commands such universal respect among; those en^^fed in the work of education, as that of Horace Mann. Beyond question, no one person has been so instrumental in I elevating the dignity of the profession of teaching; done so much to overcome >h§ prejudice or torpor of those hostile or indifferent to the common-school system, or contributed more largely in .ideas and labor towards the perfection of that system. Consequently, THE LIFE OF HORACE MANN, i BY HIS WIFE, | Just Published in one elegant 8vo Volume, ! appeals to all friends of education, as a biography eminently ! worthy their perusal, anfl widest circulation. : i That it is no less worthy of a cordial reception on its own merits will appear from the following notices : — "It is a sterling Biography, which no educated American can afford L not to read. It is only partial praise to call the book deeply interesting. It vivifies and inspires. " — Atlantic Monthly. . i "This volume cannot fail to do very much towards placing in its just and true light before the world a life which, for untiring service in the cause of human elevation and advancement, and for unswerving devotion I to truth, justice, and righteousness, and for ut'ter disregard of personal j considerations in the pursuit of duty, is among the finest examples in our , history. " — Christian Examiner. A copy of the " Life, " 8vo, printed on laid and tinted paper, and tastefully bound in bevelled boards, gilt top, will be sent to any address, post paid, on receipt of $3.00, by the Publishers, who are prepared to make liberal terms when a number of copies are I j wanted for distribution. WALKER, FULLER, & COMPANY, '±■15 Washington Street, Boston, j Wright & Potter, Printers, Xo. 4 Spring Lane, liu-ton. HHHH NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE NLM OlOSDbMT fl NLM010506498