said, and perhaps justly, that a comparison between races so
unlike is not a fair comparison. Take, then, if you prefer, the
intelligent and unintelligent periods in the history of the same race.
The old knights! Those men with mail-clad bodies and iron natures, who
stand out in imagination as symbols of masculine strength! The old
knights! They were not scholars. Their constitutions were not ruined by
study, or by superfluous sainthood of any kind. They were more at home
with the sword than the pen. They loved better "to hear the lark sing
than the mouse squeak." So their minds were sufficiently dormant. How
was it with their bodies? Were they sturdier men? Did they stand heavier
on their feet than their descendants? It is a familiar fact that the
armor which inclosed them will not hold those whom we call their
degenerate children. A friend tells me that in the armory of London
Tower there are preserved scores, if not hundreds, of the swords of
those terrible Northmen, those Vikings, who, ten centuries ago, swept
the seas and were the dread of all Europe, and that scarcely one of them
has a hilt large enough to be grasped by a man of this generation. Of
races who have left behind them no methodical records, and whose story
is preserved only in the rude rhymes of their poets and ruder
chronicles, it is not safe to make positive affirmations; but all the
indications are that the student of to-day is a larger and stronger man
than the warrior of the Middle Ages.

If we come down to periods of historical certainty, no one will doubt
that the England of the present hour is more educated than the England
of fifty years ago, or that the England of fifty years since had a
broader diffusion of intelligence than the England of a century
previous. Yet that very intelligence has prolonged life. An Englishman
lives longer to-day than he did in 1800, and longer yet than in 1700.
Here is a curious proof. Annuities calculated on a certain rate of life
in 1694 would yield a fortune to those who issued them. Calculated at
the same rate in 1794, they would ruin them; for the more general
diffusion of knowledge and refinement had added, I am not able to say
how many years to the average British life. Observe how this statement
is confirmed by some wonderful statistics preserved at Geneva. From 1600
to 1700 the average length of life in that city was 13 years 3 months.
From 1700 to 1750 it was 27 years 9 months. From 1750 to 1800, 31 years