for this page. But it is certain that educated men, for the most
part, have great portions of their muscular system hardly at all
developed, through want of exercise. The legs of even hard brain-workers
are generally exercised a good deal; for the constitutional exercise
of such is usually walking. But in large town such men give fair
play to no other thews and sinews. More especially the arms of such
men are very flabby. The muscle is soft, and slender. If the fore
legs of a horse were like that, you could not ride him but at the
risk of your neck.

Still, the great thing about man is the mind; and when I set out
by declaring that almost every man is unsound, I was thinking of
mental unsoundness. Most minds are unsound. No horse is accepted
as sound in which the practised eye of the veterinarian can find
some physical defect, something, away from normal development
and action. And if the same rule be applied to us, my readers;
if every man is mentally a screw, in whose intellectual and moral
development a sharp eye can detect something not right in the play
of the machinery or the formation of it; then I fancy that we may
safely lay it down as an axiom, that there is not upon the face of
the earth a perfectly sane man. A sane mind means a healthy mind;
that is, a mind that is exactly what it ought to be. Where shall
we discover such a one? My reader, you have not got it. I have
not got it. Nobody has got it. No doubt, at the first glance, this
seems startling; but I intend this essay to be a consolatory one,
and I wish to show you that in this world it is well if means will
fairly and decently suffice for their ends, even though they be
very far from being all that we could wish. God intends not that
this world should go on upon a system of optimism. It is enough,
if things are so, that they will do. They might do far better. And