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PHYSICAL TBAINING. 147
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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- Whoever Lias Watched The Growth From I...
gold medals , and professional prizes of every degree , —the young working women fight bravely their battle of life for a few yearsand
then they also droop and sicken , and perhaps die . More often , the indomitable energy of their classwhich in the nature of things is at
present select in will and purpose , , carries them over the slough of despond , after years of shaken health and impaired power of
exertion , during which their chance of obtaining eminence in their profession has been cruelly lessened .
Then the looker-on observes with a fatal shake of the head— " See how impossible it is for women to work hard ! " They forget that
Fashion also has her numerous victims , and the boy ' s college and counting-house their own proportion of the slain .
In drawing this melancholy picture of a state of things which every reader will verify for him and herself as they look round their
own social circle , we are not ignorant how much has been effected during the last two centuries towards the improvement of public
health and the prolongation of life in England . Indeed the gain effected has been far greater than the general public is aware of
, but it affords , in itself , the most convincing proof of the preventible nature of all the ravages still committed by lingering disease and
early death . We are now approaching the second centenary of the great plague , the last of those frightful epidemics which once
desolated our land ;—for the cholera , much as we dread it , is a mere trifle , in extent and fatality , to the " Black Death" and " dreadful
sickness " of which we read in early English history , or to that pestilence of 1665 , of whose ending Defoe graphically says : —
could " Nothing have done but it ; the immediate contagion finger desp of ised God all , no medicine thing but ., death Omni raged poten in t power every ,
the corner town ; and of all and gone everything on as it did that then had , a a few soul weeks : men more every would where have began cleared to despair—heart failed them for fear—le were made desperate through
every peop countenances the anguish of of their the souls le — " and the terrors of death sat in the very faces and peop .
Compare this with any state of the public mind conceivable in
our drained , paved , and decently arranged towns , and our reader will perceive that we have no intention of being unfair to the
present in comparison with the past . In average duration of life the improvement is still more remarkable . We have before us the
' Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science , ' which contains among its valuable papers one by
Dr . South wood Smith ' on the Evidences of the Prolongation of Life during the Eighteenth Century ; ' in which it is incontestably proved
that , during the hundred years elapsing between 1690 and 1790 , " a portion nearly equivalent to one-fourth of the total period of existence was added
to human life in the progress of that century" The calculations on which this assertion is based , and which have reference to two Tontines
, ( a peculiar kind of annuity , ) established respectively by William and
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Physical Tbaining. 147
PHYSICAL _TBAINING _. 147
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Citation
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English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), May 1, 1858, page 147, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01051858/page/3/
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