To say that this should be amended is to say little.  Either it must be amended, or the American race fails;—­there is no middle ground.  If we fail, (which I do not expect, I assure you,) we fail disastrously.  If we succeed, if we bring up our vital and muscular developments into due proportion with our nervous energy, we shall have a race of men and women such as the world never saw.  Dolorosus, when in the course of human events you are next invited to give a Fourth-of-July Oration, grasp at the opportunity, and take for your subject “Health.”  Tell your audience, when you rise to the accustomed flowers of rhetoric as the day wears on, that Health is the central luminary, of which all the stars that spangle the proud flag of our common country are but satellites; and close with a hint to the plumed emblem of our nation, (pointing to the stuffed one which will probably be exhibited on the platform,) that she should not henceforward confine her energies to the hatching of short-lived eaglets, but endeavor rather to educate a few full-grown birds.

As I take it, Nature said, some years since,—­“Thus far the English is my best race; but we have had Englishmen enough; now for another turning of the globe, and a step farther.  We need something with a little more buoyancy than the Englishman; let us lighten the ship, even at the risk of a little peril in the process.  Put in one drop more of nervous fluid and make the American.”  With that drop, a new range of promise opened on the human race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organized type of mankind was born.  But the promise must be fulfilled through unequalled dangers.  With the new drop came new intoxication, new ardors, passions, ambitions, hopes, reactions, and despairs,—­more daring, more invention, more disease, more insanity,—­forgetfulness, at first, of the old, wholesome traditions of living, recklessness of sin and saleratus, loss of refreshing sleep and of the power of play.  To surmount all this, we have got to fight the good fight, I assure you, Dolorosus.  Nature is yet pledged to produce that finer type, and if we miss it, she will leave us to decay, like our predecessors,—­whirl the globe over once more, and choose a new place for a new experiment.

MY DOUBLE; AND HOW HE UNDID ME.

It is not often that I trouble the readers of the “Atlantic Monthly.”  I should not trouble them now, but for the importunities of my wife, who “feels to insist” that a duty to society is unfulfilled, till I have told why I had to have a double, and how he undid me.  She is sure, she says, that intelligent persons cannot understand that pressure upon public servants which alone drives any man into the employment of a double.  And while I fear she thinks, at the bottom of her heart, that my fortunes will never be remade, she has a faint hope, that, as another Rasselas, I may teach a lesson to future publics, from which they may profit, though we die.  Owing to the behaviour of my double, or, if you please, to that public pressure which compelled me to employ him, I have plenty of leisure to write this communication.