HEIGHT. _Number measured. Average._
New-Zealanders................... 147 5 feet 6-3/4 inches.
Students at Edinburgh............ 800 5 " 7-1/10 "
Class of 1860. Cambridge (Mass.). 106 5 " 7-3/5 "
Students at Cambridge (Eng.)..... 80 5 " 8-3/5 "
WEIGHT.
New-Zealanders................... 146 140 pounds.
Soldiers 58th Regiment........... 1778 142 "
Class of 1860. Cambridge (Mass.). 106 142-1/2 "
Students at Cambridge (Eng.)..... 80 143 "
Men weighed at Boston (U.S.)
Mechanics' Fair, 1860 ......... 4369 146-3/4 "
Englishmen (Dr. Thomson)......... 2648 148 "
Cambridge, Eng. (a newspaper
statement) .................... ---- 151 "
Revolutionary officers at West
Point, August 10th, 1778,
given in "Milledulcia," p. 273.. 11 226 "
AREA OF CHEST.
New-Zealanders................... 151 35.36 inches.
Soldiers 58th Regiment........... 628 36.71 "
STRENGTH IN LIFTING.
New-Zealanders................... 31 367 pounds.
Students fit Edinburgh, aged 25.. ---- 416 "
Soldiers 58th Regiment........... 33 422 "
NOTE. The range of strength among the New-Zealanders was from 250
pounds to 420 pounds; among the soldiers, from 350 pounds to 504 pounds.
But it is the test of longevity which exhibits the greatest triumph for
civilization, because here the life-insurance tables furnish ample,
though comparatively recent statistics. Of course, in legendary ages all
lives were of enormous length; and the Hindoos in their sacred books
attribute to their progenitors a career of forty million years or
thereabouts,--what may safely be termed a ripe old age; for if a man
were still unripe after celebrating his forty-millionth birthday, he
might as well give it up. But from the beginning of accurate statistics
we know that the duration of life in any nation is a fair index of
its progress in civilization, Quetelet gives statistics, more or less
reliable, from every nation of Northern Europe, showing a gain of ten to
twenty-five per cent, during the last century. Where the tables are most
carefully prepared, the result is least equivocal. Thus, in Geneva,
where accurate registers have been kept for three hundred years, it
seems that from 1560 to 1600 the average lifetime of the citizens was
twenty-one years and two months; in the next century, twenty-five years
and nine months; in the century following, thirty-two years and nine
months; and in the year 1833, forty years and five months: thus nearly
doubling the average age of man in Geneva, within those three centuries
of social progress. In France, it is estimated, that, in spite of
revolutions and Napoleons, human life has been gaining at the rate
of two months a year for nearly a century. By a manuscript of the
fourteenth century, moreover, it is shown that the rate of mortality
in Paris was then one in sixteen,--one person dying annually to every
sixteen of the inhabitants. It is now one in thirty-two,--a gain of a
hundred per cent, in five hundred years. In England the progress
has been far more rapid. The rate of mortality in 1690 was one in
thirty-three; in 1780 it was one in forty; and it stands now at one in
sixty,--the healthiest condition in Europe,--while in half-barbarous
Russia the rate of mortality is one in twenty-seven. It would be easy to
multiply these statistics to any extent; but they all point one way, and
no medical statistician now pretends to oppose the dictum of Hufeland,
that "a certain degree of culture is physically necessary for man, and
promotes duration of life."
The simple result is, that the civilized man is physically superior to
the barbarian. There is now no evidence that there exists in any part of
the world a savage race who, taken as a whole, surpass or even equal the
Anglo-Saxon type in average physical condition; as there is also
none among whom the President elect of the United States and the
Commander-in-chief of his armies would not be regarded as remarkably
tall men, and Dr. Windship a remarkably strong one. "It is now well
known," says Prichard, "that all savage races have less muscular power
than civilized men." Johnstone in Northern Africa, and Cumming in
Southern Africa, could find no one to equal them in strength of arm.
At the Sandwich Islands, Ellis records, that, "when a boat manned by
English seamen and a canoe with natives left the shore together, the
canoe would uniformly leave the boat behind, but they would soon relax,
while the seamen, pulling steadily on, would pass them, but, if the
voyage took three hours, would invariably reach the destination first."
Certain races may have been regularly trained by position and necessity
in certain particular arts,--as Sandwich-Islanders in swimming, and our
Indians in running,--and may naturally surpass the average skill of
those who are comparatively out of practice in that speciality; yet it
is remarkable that their greatest feats even in these ways never seem
to surpass those achieved by picked specimens of civilization. The best
Indian runners could only equal Lewis and Clarke's men, and they have
been repeatedly beaten in prize-races within the last few years; while
the most remarkable aquatic feat on record is probably that of Mr.
Atkins of Liverpool, who recently dived to a depth of two hundred and
thirty feet, reappearing above water in one minute and eleven seconds.
In the wilderness and on the prairies, we find a general impression that
cultivation and refinement must weaken the race. Not at all; they simply
domesticate it. Domestication is not weakness. A strong hand does not
become less muscular under a kid glove; and a man who is a hero in a red
shirt will also be a hero in a white one. Civilization, imperfect as
it is, has already procured for us better food, better air, and better
behavior; it gives us physical training on system; and its mental
training, by refining the nervous organization, makes the same quantity
of muscular power go much farther. The young English ensigns and
lieutenants who at Waterloo (in the words of Wellington) "rushed to meet
death, as if it were a game of cricket," were the fruit of civilization.
They were representatives, indeed, of the aristocracy of their nation;
and here, where the aim of all institutions is to make the whole nation
an aristocracy, we must plan to secure the same splendid physical
superiority on a grander scale. It is in our power, by using even very
moderately for this purpose our magnificent machinery of common schools,
to give to the physical side of civilization an advantage which it has
possessed nowhere else, not even in England or Germany. It is not yet
time to suggest detailed plans on this subject, since the public mind
is not yet fully awake even to the demand. When the time comes, the
necessary provisions can be made easily,--at least, as regards boys;
for the physical training of girls is a far more difficult problem
The organization is more delicate and complicated, the embarrassments
greater, the observations less carefully made, the successes fewer,
the failures far more disastrous. Any intelligent and robust man may
undertake the physical training of fifty boys, however delicate their
organization, with a reasonable hope of rearing nearly all of them, by
easy and obvious methods, into a vigorous maturity; but what wise man
or woman can expect anything like the same proportion of success, at
present, with fifty American girls?
This is the most momentous health-problem with which we have to deal,--
to secure the proper physical advantages of civilization for American
women. Without this there can be no lasting progress. The Sandwich
Island proverb says,--
"If strong be the frame of the mother,
Her son shall make laws for the people."
But in this country, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that
every man grows to maturity surrounded by a circle of invalid female
relatives, that he later finds himself the husband of an invalid wife
and the parent of invalid daughters, and that he comes at last to regard
invalidism, as Michelet coolly declares, the normal condition of that
sex,--as if the Almighty did not know how to create a woman. This, of
course, spreads a gloom over life. When I look at the morning throng of
schoolgirls in summer, hurrying through every street, with fresh, young
faces, and vesture of lilies, duly curled and straw-hatted and booted,
and turned off as patterns of perfection by proud mammas,--it is not sad
to me to think that all this young beauty must one day fade and die, for
there are spheres of life beyond this earth, I know, and the soul is
good to endure through more than one;--the sadness is in the unnatural
nearness of the decay, to foresee the living death of disease that is
waiting close at hand for so many, to know how terrible a proportion of
those fair children are walking unconsciously into a weary, wretched,
powerless, joyless, useless maturity. Among the myriad triumphs of
advancing civilization, there seems but one formidable danger, and that
is here.
It cannot be doubted, however, that the peril will pass by, with
advancing knowledge. In proportion to our national recklessness of
danger is the promptness with which remedial measures are adopted, when
they at last become indispensable. In the mean time, we must look for
proofs of the physical resources of woman into foreign and even
into savage lands. When an American mother tells me with pride, as
occasionally happens, that her daughter can walk two miles and back
without great fatigue, the very boast seems a tragedy; but when one
reads that Oberea, queen of the Sandwich Islands, lifted Captain Wallis
over a marsh as easily as if he had been a little child, there is a
slight sense of consolation. Brunhilde, in the "Nibelungen," binds her
offending lover with her girdle and slings him up to the wall. Cymburga,
wife of Duke Ernest of Lithuania, could crack nuts between her fingers,
and drive nails into a wall with her thumb;--whether she ever got her
husband under it is not recorded. Let me preserve from oblivion the
renown of my Lady Butterfield, who, about the year 1700, at Wanstead,
in Essex, (England,) thus advertised:--"This is to give notice to my
honored masters and ladies and loving friends, that my Lady Butterfield
gives a challenge to ride a horse, or leap a horse, or run afoot, or
_hollo_, with any woman in England seven years younger, but not a day
older, because I won't undervalue myself, being now 74 years of age."
Nor should be left unrecorded the high-born Scottish damsel whose
tradition still remains at the Castle of Huntingtower, in Scotland,
where two adjacent pinnacles still mark the Maiden's Leap. She sprang
from battlement to battlement, a distance of nine feet and four inches,
and eloped with her lover. Were a young lady to go through one of our
villages in a series of leaps like that, and were she to require her
lovers to follow in her footsteps, it is to be feared that she would die
single.
Yet the transplanted race which has in two centuries stepped from Delft
Haven to San Francisco has no reason to be ashamed of its physical
achievements, the more especially as it has found time on the way for
one feat of labor and endurance which may be matched without fear
against any historic deed. When civilization took possession of
this continent, it found one vast coating of almost unbroken forest
overspreading it from shore to prairie. To make room for civilization,
that forest must go. What were Indians, however deadly,--what
starvation, however imminent,--what pestilence, however lurking,--to a
solid obstacle like this? No mere courage could cope with it, no mere
subtlety, no mere skill, no Yankee ingenuity, no labor-saving machine
with head for hands; but only firm, unwearying, bodily muscle to every
stroke. Tree by tree, in two centuries, that forest has been felled.
What were the Pyramids to that? There does not exist in history an
athletic feat so astonishing.
But there yet lingers upon this continent a forest of moral evil more
formidable, a barrier denser and darker, a Dismal Swamp of inhumanity,
a barbarism upon the soil, before which civilization has thus far been
compelled to pause,--happy, if it could even check its spread. Checked
at last, there comes from it a cry as if the light of day had turned to
darkness,--when the truth simply is, that darkness is being mastered and
surrounded by the light of day. Is it a good thing to "extend the area
of freedom" by pillaging some feeble Mexico? and does the phrase become
a bad one only when it means the peaceful progress of constitutional
liberty within our own borders? The phrases which oppression teaches
become the watchwords of freedom at last, and the triumph of
Civilization over Barbarism is the only Manifest Destiny of America.