Your degrees of learning are but empty honors compared with this profitable distinction. You insure no certain rewards for that acquirement of knowledge which has won its parchment of approval, and the holder enjoys only the slim advantage which his certificate secures. His degree wins him no bread, and the honors of his career rest uncertain, with all his struggles ahead. Our workman, at each step of his advancement, increases his income, under the assurance and protection of our industrial methods, with the certainty and stability of a government pension. But while we have found it wise to honor and protect manual skill, the physical strength of our people has for many ages been a subject of general attention. Among the productions of the Supreme Author which he is engaged in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance on your planet is surely man himself, as a being animal as well as mental. As an indolent, weak and passive body is usually associated with a mind of the same character, it is only by the cultivation of both together that society improves. You have evidences enough of the inseparable connection between mental and physical energy, and yet your cultivation of the body has engaged but little attention. It seems to us one of the most serious objections to your religious abstractions, that the spirit of all of them tends to deny or belittle the great service of healthy sinews and nerves in the progress of social improvement. You will find intellectual stagnation everywhere upon the face of the Earth, where incentives to muscular action are suppressed from whatever cause, and you know by experience that the decay of mental vigor, by a release from the necessity of bodily exercise, has obliged the brawn and muscle of your age, in more than one instance, to come to the front in the management of affairs. Civilization, at a certain degree of its progress, is expected to assume duties which until then, have been faithfully performed by nature alone. Like a good mother she has provided, in your primitive state, against the degeneration of your bodies by the operation of her universal law, the survival of the fittest. In your social betterment you can reasonably be expected to provide for yourselves some substitute to maintain that standard of hardihood and strength which had formerly been kept up by your primitive struggles for existence.