English,--just as a railway-train running at forty miles an hour is
more liable to accident than one proceeding at twenty. Besides,
Americans have not learned to live as these new circumstances require.
The New Man is a clipper-ship, that can run out of sight of land while
one of the old bluff-bowed, round-ribbed craft is creeping out of port;
but, from the very nature of his superiorities, he is apt to be
shorter-lived, and more likely to spring a leak in the strain of a
storm. He demands nicer navigation. It will not do for him to beat over
sand-bars. Yet dinner-pilotage in this country is reckless and
unscientific to a degree. The land is full of wrecks hopelessly snagged
upon indigestible diet. As yet, it is difficult to obtain a hearing for
precaution. Men answer you out of their past experience,--much like a
headstrong personage who was about to attempt crossing a river in a
boat sure to sink. "You will drown, if you go in that thing," said a
bystander. "Never was drowned yet," was the prompt retort; and pushing
off, he soon lost the opportunity to repeat that boast! But this
resistance is constantly becoming less. Meantime, numbers of foreseeing
men are waking up, or are already awakened, to the importance of
recreation and physical culture,--members of the clerical profession,
to the credit of the craft be it said, taking the lead. Messrs.
Beecher, Bellows, and Hale plead the cause of amusements; the author of
"Saints and their Bodies" celebrates the uses and urges the need of
athletic sports; gymnasia are becoming matters of course in the cities
and larger towns; "The New York Tribune" attends to the matter of
cookery; and it is safe to predict that the habits of the people will
undergo in time the necessary changes. That health is possible to
Americans ought not to be questioned. Of despair we will not listen to
a word. In crossing the ocean, in the backwoods-experience which
everywhere precedes cultivation, in the excitement which has followed
the obliteration of social monopolies and the throwing open of the