There are innumerable aspects of this great transformation; but there is one, in special, which has been continually ignored or evaded.  In the midst of our civilization, there is a latent distrust of civilization.  We are never weary of proclaiming the enormous gain it has brought to manners, to morals, and to intellect; but there is a wide-spread impression that the benefit is purchased by a corresponding physical decay.  This alarm has had its best statement from Emerson.  “Society never advances.  It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other....  What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New-Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and the undivided twentieth part of a shed to sleep under!  But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that his aboriginal strength the white man has lost.  If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad-axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch; and the same blow shall send the white man to his grave.”

Were this true, the fact would be fatal.  Man is a progressive being, only on condition that he begin at the beginning.  He can afford to wait centuries for a brain, but he cannot subsist a second without a body.  If civilization sacrifice the physical thus hopelessly to the mental, and barbarism merely sacrifice the mental to the physical, then barbarism is unquestionably the better thing, so far as it goes, because it provides the essential preliminary conditions, and so can afford to wait.  Barbarism is a one-story log-hut, a poor thing, but better than nothing; while such a civilization would be simply a second story, with a first story too weak to sustain it, a magnificent sky-parlor, with all heaven in view from the upper windows, but with the whole family coming down in a crash presently, through a fatal neglect of the basement.  In such a view, an American Indian or a Kaffir warrior may be a wholesome object, good for something already, and for much more when he gets a brain built on.  But when one sees a bookworm in his library, an anxious merchant-prince in his counting-room, tottering feebly about, his thin underpinning scarcely able to support what he has already crammed into that heavy brain of his, and he still piling in more,—­one feels disposed to cry out, “Unsafe passing here!  Stand from under!”

Sydney Smith, in his “Moral Philosophy,” has also put strongly this case of physiological despair.  “Nothing can be plainer than that a life of society is unfavorable to all the animal powers of men....  A Choctaw could run from here to Oxford without stopping.  I go in the mail-coach; and the time the savage has employed in learning to run so fast I have employed in learning something useful.  It would not only be useless in me to run like a Choctaw, but foolish and disgraceful.”  But one may