One hopeful sign for the future is, that this great subject of the physical aids and the physical obstacles to virtue is attracting attention and rising into importance. Our philanthropists have stopped giving tracts to hungry people; at least they give bread first. It is now a recognized truth, that it takes a certain number of cubic yards for a person to be virtuous in; and that, consequently, in that square mile of New York in which two hundred and ninety thousand people live, there must be--absolutely _must_ be--an immense number of unvirtuous persons. No human virtue or civilization can long exist where four families live in a room, some of whom take boarders. The way to regenerate this New York mile is simply to widen Manhattan Island by building three bridges over the East River, and to shorten the island by making three lines of underground or overground railroad to the upper end of it. We may say, too, there are circles--not many, it is true, but some--in which a man's religion would not be considered a very valuable acquisition, if, when he had "got" it, he kept on chewing tobacco. Such a flagrant and abominable violation of the Creator's laws, by a person distinctly professing a special veneration for them, would be ludicrous, if it were not so pernicious. The time is at hand when these simple and fundamental matters will have their proper place in all our schemes for the improvement of one another. The impulse in this direction given by the publication of the most valuable work of this century--Buckle's "History of Civilization in England"--will not expend itself in vain. If that author had but lived, he would not have disdained, in recounting the obstacles to civilization, to consider the effects upon the best modern brains of a poison that lulls their noblest faculties to torpor, and enables them languidly to endure what they ought constantly to fight.