Accordingly, it comes within the province of our Government Health Department to direct, and in some degree supervise, those marital engagements out of which our numbers are so constantly replenished. This important business is closely associated with measures designed in other ways to promote our health, and may be said to begin at the birth of every child. Each infant is carefully examined by medical experts, and registered. Every peculiarity or bodily defect is recorded, and rules of management furnished, as remedies, if found necessary. Every person, young or old, is required periodically to pass a like examination. The personal health register is open to all, and the bodily condition of every inhabitant may be in that way ascertained. None fail to avail themselves of information so greatly concerning themselves. Incipient diseases are in a vast number of cases remedied by this discovery of their unsuspected presence, and the habits of life are often changed in time to head off some latent malady, which in its early stages, nothing but medical science could reveal.
The system establishes a public record of the physical standing, either in lurking disease or deformity, of every individual; and as it is made the duty of our health department to declare its judgment of approval in every marriage contract, we have no transmitted disease or deformities of body running through generations, and multiplying the miseries of life, as you have. We have long ago stamped out by this method three-fourths of the diseases which are nourished by the habits of civilization. By this means we have secured a race of men and women so physically perfect as to cause existence to be accepted as a grateful patrimony. You have interrogated nature in her laws of development, and in her processes of modification both in forms and qualities of things, and with a knowledge so acquired, you have cultivated a world of animal and vegetable organisms to your better service. We have done that, too; but we have accomplished in that line something of incomparably more importance to us, in advancing together by due cultivation and care our animal as well as our intellectual selves.
You cannot fail to discover in this, one of the effects of that striking divergence between our civilization and yours, due to widely different interpretations of the divine will. We look upon our planet with all its appurtenances as a bequest which has been delivered into our keeping for that assistance in progression so plainly the best and most exalted business of our lives, and so unmistakably pleasing to the Supreme Author that every degree of its accomplishment is rewarded by signs of his favor. From our better demonstrated spiritual belief, we derive the inspiration to increase and bestow upon each other the best things of life; while you, under religious promptings from the same high source, condemn yourselves to abstinence and austerity. You so misconceive the true relations between spiritual and material forces, that instead of regarding each as the nursery and builder-up of the other, you have devised a theory which brings them into antagonism as diverse influences; the exercise of material concerns, as you assume, tending to lead you away from the divinity.
The effect of this mistaken view of life is plainly to be seen in your society and surroundings. Your material progression, deprived of the religious impulse and enthusiasm, and depending wholly upon the lower faculty of self-gain, advances by slow degrees, frequently retrogresses, and is not secure of a total relapse under so mercenary a moving power. Your forward movement, instead of being compact and co-operative like ours, drags along fitfully and laboriously, marshaled alone by a struggling influence here and there, under the dead weight of an indifferent and self absorbed multitude, and in open conflict with a host of disturbed traditions.
Your doctrine of the absolute divorce of spiritual and material interests, by wasting your best parts in the service of the world-condemning deity of your imagination, and surrendering your temporal affairs to the sole exercise of your lower sentiments and feelings, has spread its dire effects, and may be traced in every phase of your society. Out of it comes that singular disregard for each other in all things except the spiritual, and that perverted estimate of goodness, which has consigned your science and learning with their influences, together with your whole world of industry, to places where unassisted and unencouraged they must work out their own doubtfully admitted and tardy rewards; while your best enthusiasm and most active morality is led to waste among your many unreasoning schemes of salvation.
What but this unwarranted dissociation of spirit and matter, of the body and soul, of your physical and intellectual parts, regarding one as the degrading yokemate of the other instead of the counterpart and co-worker, has taken all the heart out of your lives, hidden from you the moral possibilities within your worldly reach, and reduced the only existence you are so far called upon to improve into a dead and useless hibernation of your divinest faculties? What more readily excuses and defends your indifference to the hard lines of human labor, and your toleration of a system which dooms most of you to perpetual dependence, than those mossgrown traditions which, from their selected quarters among the supernatural and unseen, are not disturbed or interested by your social wrongs, and which in truth find their best patronage and most profitable employment where most prevail the miseries of life? Just in the degree in which you are already emancipated from these barren illusions, does your most humane work in social progress appear.
Your inspirations of goodness come to you as they come to us, without the necessity of a revelation. Their encouragement is more faithfully secured by the benign influence which rewards their adoption, than those written codes among you which assume, under doubtful motives, their direction and control. As surely as all the forces of nature may be traced to the heat of the sun, so your impulses of virtue, your heroism of good deeds, and your spiritual hopes, are conveyed to you in a germinal state without any intercepting medium, with the first breath of of your bodies; to be improved, enlarged and harvested for the purposes and uses of society.
You turn over the surface of the Earth and gather its fruits, never doubting the superhuman forces in conjunction which reward your labor; and yet your intellectual tillage is left to take its chances among circumscribed opportunities which no combined effort has attempted to enlarge. Your progress cannot be otherwise than uncertain and your governments will always be unstable in their foundations under your system, which at its best furnishes scarcely one disciplined mind in a hundred, and the acquirements of that one, too, resulting only from a spontaneous individual impulse, with, in most cases, no higher motives than self-gain and advancement.
Your fields are not wanting in your attentions. You bring profit to yourselves by the thorough tillage of your acres. You multiply by your manipulation under nature’s hints the life-supporting and pleasure-giving properties of the fruits and flowers of the Earth to the extremest blossoming and abundance. And yet in such a state of general crudity is your own divine essence of reason and thought, that to this day no superstition is too absurd, no sophistry too transparent, and no pretended reform too ill digested to take root and flourish, even to the disintegration of large patches of your social life. So that while no fault can be found with your progress in the handling of the material agents under your control, the opinion is irresistible, from our point of view, that you are assiduously cultivating everything but yourselves.