To these three experimental proofs we may add the confirmation derived from the grand doctrine named the Correlation, Conservation, Persistence, or Limitation of Force, as applied to the human body and the human mind.  We cannot create force anywhere; we merely appropriate existing force.  The heat of our fires has been derived from the solar fire.  We cannot lift a weight in the hand without the combustion of a certain amount of food; we cannot think a thought without a similar demand; and the force that goes in one way is unavailable in any other way.  While we are expending ourselves largely in any single function—­in muscular exercise, in digestion, in thought and feeling, the remaining functions must continue for the time in comparative abeyance.  Now, the maintenance of a high strain of elated feeling, unquestionably costs a great deal to the forces of the system.  All the facts confirm this high estimate.  An unusually copious supply of arterial blood to the brain is an indispensable requisite, even although other organs should be partially starved, and consequently be left in a weak condition, or else deteriorate before their time.  To support the excessive demand of power for one object, less must be exacted from other functions.  Hard bodily labour and severe mental application sap the very foundations of buoyancy; they may not entail much positive suffering, but they are scarcely compatible with exuberant spirits.  There may be exceptional individuals whose total of power is a very large figure, who can bear more work, endure more privation, and yet display more buoyancy, without shortened life, than the average human being.  Hardly any man can attain commanding greatness without being constituted larger than his fellows in the sum of human vitality.  But until this is proved to be the fact in any given instance, we are safe in presuming that extraordinary endowment in one thing implies deficiency in other things.  More especially must we conclude, provisionally at least, that a buoyant, hopeful, elated temperament lacks some other virtues, aptitudes, or powers, such as are seen flourishing in the men whose temperament is sombre, inclining to despondency.  Most commonly the contradictory demand is reconciled by the proverbial “short life and merry”.

Adverting now to the object that Helps had so earnestly at heart—­namely, to rouse and rescue the English population from their comparative dulness to a more lively and cheerful flow of existence—­let us reflect how, upon the foregoing principles, this is to be done.  Not certainly by an eloquent appeal to the nation to get up and be amused.  The process will turn out to be a more circuitous one.

The mental conformation of the English people, which we may admit to be less lively and less easily amused than the temperament of Irishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, or even the German branch of our own Teutonic race, is what it is from natural causes, whether remote descent, or that coupled with the operation of climate and other local peculiarities.  How long would it take, and what would be the way to establish in us a second nature on the point of cheerfulness?