When the benevolent of the land (and they may be numbered by tens of thousands) shall once have learnt this plain and yet awful truth, a vast upward step will have been gained. Because this new Association will teach it them, during the next ten or twenty years, may God’s blessing be on it, and, on the noble old man who presides over it. Often already has he deserved well of his country; but never better than now, when he has lent his great name and great genius to the object of preserving human life from wholesale destruction by unnecessary poison. And meanwhile let the Sanitary Reformer work and wait. “Go not after the world,” said a wise man, “for if thou stand still long enough the world will come round to thee.” And to Sanitary Reform the world will come round at last. Grumbling, scoffing, cursing its benefactors; boasting at last, as usual, that it discovered for itself the very truths which it tried to silence, it will come; and will be glad at last to accept the one sibylline leaf, at the same price at which it might have had the whole. The Sanitary Reformer must make up his mind to see no fruit of his labours, much less thanks or reward. He must die in faith, as St. Paul says all true men die, “not having received the promises;” worn out, perhaps, by ill-paid and unappreciated labour, as that truest-hearted and most unselfish of men, Charles Robert Walsh, died but two years ago. But his works will follow him—not, as the preachers tell us, to heaven—for of what use would they be there, to him or to mankind?—but here, on earth, where he set them, that they might go on in his path, after his example, and prosper and triumph long years after he is dead, when his memory shall be blessed by generations not merely “yet unborn,” but who never would have been born at all, had he not inculcated into their unwilling fathers the simplest laws of physical health, decency, life—laws which the wild cat of the wood, burying its own excrement apart from its lair, has learnt by the light of nature; but which neither nature nor God Himself can as yet teach to a selfish, perverse, and hypocritical generation. FOOTNOTES {3} This lecture was one of a series of “Lectures to Ladies,” given in London in 1855, at the Needlewoman’s Institution. {21} The substance of this Essay was a lecture on Physical Education, given at the Midland Institute, Birmingham, in 1872. {36} 9, Adam Street, Adelphi, London. {49} A Lecture delivered at Winchester, May 31, 1869. {77} Lecture delivered at Winchester, March 17, 1869. {110} I quote from the translation of the late lamented Philip Stanhope Worsley, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. {114} Odyssey, book vi. 127–315; vol. i. pp. 143–150 of Mr. Worsley’s translation.