of children who walked two-and-two along the high road, too many with lesson-books, moving their lips as they walked; and the rest driven to gossip, in the absence of any other interest. They were as unfortunate as so many Quakers, or nearly. They were not in infancy set on high stools for an hour at a time, to fit them for silent meetings; and they were not kept quite so tame in their boisterous years; but we saw in a whole generation of middle-class people the same tendency to inane play that we see in Quaker children, and incipient monks and premature Evangelicals, and Shakers, and Tünkers, and book-worms, and all the rest of the body-despisers;—the same helplessness in all emergencies, the same clumsiness of gait and sheepishness of manner. For a whole generation we have seen strong men walking with their arms as much as their legs, and young men shuffling along the street, and creeping up and down the outside of a coach, and cautiously climbing a gate, and closely studying a hedge or a ditch before trying to cross it. To see such young men amidst an alarm of thieves in the house was very sad. You could not ask them to rid you of a wasp in the window without the white feather coming out. They had as much courage in their own way as their fathers; but they had never been put in due possession of their own bodies, and thus were subject to the penalties of cowardice. They had played in a way at school, besides the regular walk. There were swings, perhaps; there was marbles; there was ball-play; there were races,—all good to a certain extent, but not enough. There was drill in some Quaker-schools, we must do them the justice to state; and in others there was dancing, more or less;—good too, but no great matter. The boys could not swim; they could not ride; they could not box; they could not fence; they did not know how to handle any weapon; they could not keep their own heads with their own right arms. It was a strange sensation to go from living in such a generation to the wilder parts of America. I say the wilder parts, because there was then nothing to be said for the physical education of the young people of the great cities, and of the eastern States generally. The practice of the country walk even did not exist; and there were no country walks for townspeople. But in the rural districts, in the woods, on the prairie, or the wild sea-shore, what a spectacle it was to one from the Old Country! There the boys ran up the trees like monkeys, and flitted about the face of the rocks like sea-birds. Little children would mark a wild bee in its flight, and follow it through bush and briar to its tree, and there circumvent the whole swarm, and bring home a prize of honey. Their swing was a tossing branch over a cataract; and mere infants would climb about a hole in a wooden bridge over a rapid. Girls could ride a bare-backed horse for miles in the night, to fetch the doctor. To swim, to ride, to shoot, was as much a matter of course as to sleep and wake. In such places the learning did not get on very well. The contrast was between the pedantry and bodily helplessness of the one mode of training, and the strong natural faculty (of body and mind), without intellectual discipline, of the other.
The most piteous sight was the communities in which both were wanting;—the Shakers, Rappites, and other religious communists living between these opposite methods of society. It was hard to help both laughing and crying when the Shakers were at their dancing rites. The young girls and boys were evidently making that exercise a safety-valve for their energies. The boys stamped and kicked vehemently: the girls almost cut capers; and there was no mistaking, in their faces, the longing for a game at romps. Just before I saw this, a poor little girl had been expelled for a prank which was irresistible. She was half-dead of the vapours when, one Sunday, when all but herself were supposed to be in chapel, she saw from the kitchen a pony scampering about the paddock. Off she went through the window, jumped on the pony’s bare back, and galloped round and round, coming in much relieved. But she had been seen; and she was expelled. A friend of mine took her in, and trained her for service,—much struck by this lesson about the mischief of repressing the animal spirits of youth.
What became of these animal spirits, it may be asked, during the English generation who had no proper physical training?
There was a great flocking into the army and navy on the part of all classes,—from the public school-boy, the prince of the field, to the troublesome cottage lad, who sooner or later “went for a soldier,” or “ran off to sea,” wept by his mother, and by no means regretted by the neighbours. There was a great deal of smuggling in those days, and much more poaching. There was a good deal of rioting occasionally,—breaking of threshing-machines in agricultural counties, and of power-looms in the manufacturing districts: but a commoner safety-valve was poaching. There was less netting and snaring of game than now, and more shooting. This was part of the temptation. It is now the great temptation to the slaughter of small birds of which we are complaining under our present plague of slugs, caterpillars and wire-worms. Not only boys but men like the excuse for popping off guns: and hence the extirpation of many useful birds which we may never see restored. If the village butts and universal archery of old England had existed now, or if we now had the general practice with weapons which another generation will see, our small birds would at this moment have been devouring the moderate quantity of caterpillars which would have made their appearance. As it is, the last eagle vanished many years ago from our mountain region; and the last pair of ravens is no longer seen; the hawks and owls are too few for the field vermin in the valleys; and their absence is not likely to give us the larks we long for; for the fowling-piece is as fatal to the small singing-birds as to their enemies. We witness a random and mischievous sport with fire-arms, because more legitimate sports and exercises are absent.
Far worse has been the effect of deficient physical education in encouraging vicious indulgence. Gaming, drinking, and profligacy of every sort flourish where the frame is not kept in vigour, and the mind in the cheerfulness which belongs to bodily health. I need not dwell on this. It is