第88章

--Yes, Sir,--the Master continued,--Sir being anybody that listened, --there is neither flattery nor offence in the views which a physiological observer takes of the forms of life around him.It won't do to draw individual portraits, but the differences of natural groups of human beings are as proper subjects of remark as those of different breeds of horses, and if horses were Houyhnhnms I don't think they would quarrel with us because we made a distinction between a "Morgan" and a "Messenger." The truth is, Sir, the lean sandy soil and the droughts and the long winters and the east-winds and the cold storms, and all sorts of unknown local influences that we can't make out quite so plainly as these, have a tendency to roughen the human organization and make it coarse, something as it is with the tree I mentioned.Some spots and some strains of blood fight against these influences, but if I should say right out what Ithink, it would be that the finest human fruit, on the whole; and especially the finest women that we get in New England are raised under glass.

--Good gracious!--exclaimed the Landlady, under glass!

--Give me cowcumbers raised in the open air, said the Capitalist, who was a little hard of hearing.

--Perhaps,--I remarked,--it might be as well if you would explain this last expression of yours.Raising human beings under glass Itake to be a metaphorical rather than a literal statement of your meaning.

--No, Sir!--replied the Master, with energy,--I mean just what I say, Sir.Under glass, and with a south exposure.During the hard season, of course,--for in the heats of summer the tenderest hot-house plants are not afraid of the open air.Protection is what the transplanted Aryan requires in this New England climate.Keep him, and especially keep her, in a wide street of a well-built city eight months of the year; good solid brick walls behind her, good sheets of plate-glass, with the sun shining warm through them, in front of her, and you have put her in the condition of the pine-apple, from the land of which, and not from that of the other kind of pine, her race started on its travels.People don't know what a gain there is to health by living in cities, the best parts of them of course, for we know too well what the worst parts are.In the first place you get rid of the noxious emanations which poison so many country localities with typhoid fever and dysentery, not wholly rid of them, of course, but to a surprising degree.Let me tell you a doctor's story.I was visiting a Western city a good many years ago; it was in the autumn, the time when all sorts of malarious diseases are about.The doctor I was speaking of took me to see the cemetery just outside the town, I don't know how much he had done to fill it, for he didn't tell me, but I'll tell you what he did say.

"Look round," said the doctor."There isn't a house in all the ten-mile circuit of country you can see over, where there isn't one person, at least, shaking with fever and ague.And yet you need n't be afraid of carrying it away with you, for as long as your home is on a paved street you are safe."--I think it likely--the Master went on to say--that my friend the doctor put it pretty strongly, but there is no doubt at all that while all the country round was suffering from intermittent fever, the paved part of the city was comparatively exempted.What do you do when you build a house on a damp soil, and there are damp soils pretty much everywhere? Why you floor the cellar with cement, don't you? Well, the soil of a city is cemented all over, one may say, with certain qualifications of course.A first-rate city house is a regular sanatorium.The only trouble is, that the little good-for-nothings that come of utterly used-up and worn-out stock, and ought to die, can't die, to save their lives.So they grow up to dilute the vigor of the race with skim-milk vitality.They would have died, like good children, in most average country places; but eight months of shelter in a regulated temperature, in a well-sunned house, in a duly moistened air, with good sidewalks to go about on in all weather, and four months of the cream of summer and the fresh milk of Jersey cows, make the little sham organizations--the worm-eaten wind-falls, for that 's what they look like--hang on to the boughs of life like "froze-n-thaws"; regular struldbrugs they come to be, a good many of 'em.

--The Scarabee's ear was caught by that queer word of Swift's, and he asked very innocently what kind of bugs he was speaking of, whereupon That Boy shouted out, Straddlebugs! to his own immense amusement and the great bewilderment of the Scarabee, who only saw that there was one of those unintelligible breaks in the conversation which made other people laugh, and drew back his antennae as usual, perplexed, but not amused.

I do not believe the Master had said all he was going to say on this subject, and of course all these statements of his are more or less one-sided.But that some invalids do much better in cities than in the country is indisputable, and that the frightful dysenteries and fevers which have raged like pestilences in many of our country towns are almost unknown in the better built sections of some of our large cities is getting to be more generally understood since our well-to-do people have annually emigrated in such numbers from the cemented surface of the city to the steaming soil of some of the dangerous rural districts.If one should contrast the healthiest country residences with the worst city ones the result would be all the other way, of course, so that there are two sides to the question, which we must let the doctors pound in their great mortar, infuse and strain, hoping that they will present us with the clear solution when they have got through these processes.One of our chief wants is a complete sanitary map of every State in the Union.