J. F. Campbell Collection > Address to the middle classes upon the subject of gymnastic exercises

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sickness. This is the ordination of Providence and
the lot of humanity, and why engage in a vain at-
tempt to combat an established and immutable
order of things ?"
All is not well, and there is a necessity for
change, when want of exercise consigns numbers to
early disease and premature graves. All is not
well, when, from the same cause, numbers labour in
youth under the infirmities of age. All is not well,
when from the perpetual pressure of business, and
the absence of amusement, the soul of multitudes
is darkened with the gloom of a melancholy, which
fermenting into discontent, visits on family and
friends, on every social relation and political insti-
tution, the effects of its own misery and spleen.
All is not well, when an eminent physician can
state, as he does, on the authority of experience,
that in London there is scarcely a single individual
who enjoys perfect health. All is not well, vvhen
we reflect on the vast sums annually lavished on
the faculty and their drugs, for the cure of com-
plaints, which might have been averted by a timely
recourse to exercise. All is not well, when in Han-
nay's Catalogue, inserted at the end of his Almanack
for 1846, " we find the names of 783 medicinal nos-
trums sold in Oxford Street alone, for human use."*
This doctrine, that all is well that exists, is a dan-
gerous delusion, and is, after all, the lazy excuse of
those spurious philosophers, who avert their face
from abuses, to escape the trouble of reforming them.
* See Lancet of 25th June, 1848.