Northern Watchman

PUBLIC HEALTH.

There seems to be a strong impression prevailing with many intelligent and observing persons, that the health of our young people, young men and young women, is much less perfect than formerly; they are more feeble; there prevails a general debility; they are more subject to disease; and there are more deaths among the young than formerly; and especially the capacity for labor is greatly reduced. The younger part of the community are not only less disposed, but much less able for physical exertion than formerly. We do not state this as a determined fact; but as a strong, and, to a considerable extent, a general impression. Others can judge as well as ourselves how far it is confirmed by their own observation. For ourselves we believe the fact; and that in muscular energy, activity, and power, the race is degenerating.

We are aware that it is a fact of rather difficult proof; and that the judgment may be fairly made up it would require such a variety of statistical returns as are not easily obtained. But we not only have come to the melancholy conviction of the fact in the case, but we think we see many reasons, why such a result should be certainly expected. What these reasons are we cannot enter upon at present; but we may do it hereafter if opportunity should admit; and if the discussion be likely to prove useful.

From the number of patent nostrums, the advertisements of which crowd the columns of our newspapers, there would seem to be no necessity that mankind should ever be sick, much less that they should ever die. It may be that this wholesale quackery is one of the principal reasons of the evil, which we deplore. We have nothing farther, however, to add on this subject than to remark that there exists an intimate and inviolable sympathy between the mind and the body; that any general decline of the latter must be followed by a corresponding imbecility of the former; that considering the subject in a general view, intellectual health and energy must essentially depend on physical health and energy; and that any attempt to purchase the former at the sacrifice of the latter is commonly idle and vain; and in cases of the most brilliant success is but a miserable bargain. - New England Farmer.