Here, then, is a great stalwart man, in perfect health, all brawn and rude muscle, set up before us as the ideal of strength. Let us examine this strength a little. For one, I declare that I do not find it impressive. Yonder, in a counting-room--alas, in how many counting-rooms!--a young man with weak eyes bends over a ledger, and painfully casts up the figures day by day, on pitiful wages, to support his mother, or to send his younger brother to school, or some such matter. If we watch the young man when he takes down his hat, lays off his ink-splotched office-coat, and starts home for dinner, we perceive that he is in every respect the opposite of the stalwart Whitman ideal; his chest is not huge, his legs are inclined to be pipe-stems, and his dress is like that of any other book-keeper. Yet the weak-eyed pipe-stem-legged young man impresses me as more of a man, more of a democratic man, than the tallest of Whitman's roughs; to the eye of my spirit there is more strength in this man's daily endurance of petty care and small weariness for love; more of the sort of stuff which makes a real democracy and a sound republic, than in an army of Whitman's unshaven loafers. I know--and count it among the privileges of my life that I do--a woman who has spent her whole life in bed for twenty years past, confined by a curious form of spinal disease which prevents locomotion and which in spite of constant pain and disturbance leaves the system long unworn. Day by day she lies helpless, at the mercy of all those tyrannical small needs which become so large under such circumstances; every meal must be brought to her, a drink of water must be handed; and she is not rich, to command service. Withal her nature is of the brightest and most energetic sort. Yet, surrounded by these unspeakable pettinesses, enclosed in this cage of contradictions, the woman has made herself the centre of an adoring circle of the brightest people; her room is called "Sunnyside;" when brawny men are tired they go to her for rest, when people in the rudest physical health are sick of life they go to her for the curative virtue of her smiles. Now this woman has not so much rude muscle in her whole body as Whitman's man has in his little finger: she is so fragile that long ago some one called her "White Flower," and by this name she is much known; it costs her as much labor to press a friend's hand as it costs Whitman's rough to fell a tree; regarded from the point of view of brawn and sinew, she is simply absurd; yet to the eye of my spirit there is more manfulness in one moment of her loving and self-sacrificing existence than in an æon of muscle-growth and sinew-breeding; and hers is the manfulness which is the only solution of a true democrat, hers is the manfulness of which only can a republic be built. A republic is the government of the spirit; a republic depends upon the self-control of each member: you cannot make