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?