CHAPTER II.

[Contents]CHAPTER II.STRENGTH.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.Bodily vigor is the basis of mental and physical health. Strength is power, and the instinctive love of invigorating exercise manifests itself in the young of all but the lowest brutes. The bigot who undermines the health of his children by stinting their outdoor sport as “worldly vanity,” and “exercise that profiteth but little,” is shamed by animals who lead their young in races and trials of strength. Thus the female fox will train her cubs; the doe will race and romp with her fawn, the mare with her colt. Monkeys (like the squirrels of our northern forests) can be seen running up and down a tree and leaping from branch to branch, without any conceivable purpose but the enjoyment of the exercise itself; dogs run races, young lions wrestle and paw each other in a playful trial of prowess; even birds can be seen sporting in the air, and dolphins on the play-fields of the ocean. In nearly all classes of the vertebrate animals the rivalry of the males is decided by a trial of strength, and the female unhesitatingly accepts the victor as the fittest representative of his species.Normal children are passionately fond of athletic sports. In western Yucatan I saw Indian girls climb[34]trees with the agility of a spider-monkey, and laughingly pelt each other with the fruits of the Adansonia fig. The children of the South-sea Islanders vie in aquatic gymnastics. Spartan girls joined in the foot-races of their brothers, and by the laws of Lycurgus were not permitted to marry till they had attained a prescribed degree of proficiency in a number of athletic exercises. Race-running and wrestling were the favorite pastimes of young Romans in the undegenerate age of the republic; and, in spite of all restraints, similar propensities still manifest themselves in our school-boys. They pass the intervals of their study-hours in competitive athletics, rather than in listless inactivity, and brave frosts and snowstorms to get the benefit of outdoor exercise even in midwinter. They love health-giving sports for their own sake, as if instinctively aware that bodily strength will further every victory in the arena of life.The enthusiasm that gathered about the heroic games of Olympia made those festivals the brightest days in the springtime of the human race. The million-voiced cheers that hailed the victor of thepentathlonhave never been heard again on earth since the manliest and noblest of all recreations were suppressed by order of a crowned bigot. The rapture of competitive athletics is a bond which can obliterate the rancor of all baser rivalries, and still unites hostile tribes in the arena of pure manhood: as in Algiers, where the Bedouins joined in the gymnastic prize-games of their French foemen: the same foemen whose banquets they would have refused to share even at the bidding of starvation. In Buda-Pesth I once[35]witnessed a performance of the German athlete Weitzel, and still remember the irrepressible enthusiasm of two broad-shouldered Turks who crowded to the edge of the platform, and, with waving kerchiefs, joined in the cheers of the uncircumcised spectators.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The “survival of the fittest” means, in many important respects, the survival of the strongest. In a state of nature weakly animals yield to their stronger rivals; the stoutest lion, the swiftest tiger, has a superior chance of obtaining prey; the stouter bulls of the herd defy the attack of the wolves who overcome the resistance of the weaker individuals; the fleetest deer has the best chance to escape the pursuit of the hunter.A state of civilization does only apparently equalize such differences. The invention of gunpowder has armed the weak with the power of a giant; but the issue of international wars will always be biased by the comparative strength of sinew and steadiness of nerve of the men that handle those improved weapons. In the last Franco-Prussian war the French were favored by an undoubted superiority of arms, but they were utterly beaten by a nation whose sons had devoted their youth to gymnastics. The arms of the Gothic giants were of the rudest description: hunting-spears and clumsy battle-axes; but those axes broke the ranks of the Roman legionaries, with their polished swords and elaborate tactics. For the last two thousand years the wars[36]that decided the international rivalries of Asia, Europe, and North America nearly always ended with the victory of a northern nation over its southern neighbors. The men of the north could not always boast a superiority in science or arms, nor in number, nor in the advantage of a popular cause; but the rigor of their climate exacts a valiant effort in the struggle for existence, and steels the nerves even of an otherwise inferior race. “Fortis Fortuna adjuvat,” said a Roman proverb, which means literally that Fortune favors thestrong, and which has been well rendered in the paraphrase of a modern translator: “Force begets fortitude and conquers fortune.” Nor is that bias of fate confined to the battles of war. In the contests of peace, too, other things being equal, the strong arm will prevail against the weak, the stout heart against the faint. Bodily strength begets self-reliance. “Blest are thestrong, for they shall possess the kingdom of the earth,” would be an improved variation of the gospel text. The Germanic nations (including the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon) who have most faithfully preserved the once universal love of manly sports, have prevailed against their rivals in the arena of industry and science, as well as of war.An American manufacturer, who established a branch of his business at Havre, France, hired American and British workmen at double wages, maintaining that he found it the cheapest plan, since one of his expensive laborers could do the work of three natives. In the seaport towns, even of South America and Southern Europe, a British sailor[37]is always at a premium. American industry is steadily forcing its way further south, and may yet come to limit the fields of its enterprise only by the boundaries of the American continent. From the smallest beginnings, a nation of iron-fisted rustics has repeatedly risen to supremacy in arms and arts. Two hundred years before the era of Norman conquests in France, Italy, and Great Britain, the natives of Norway were but a race of hardy hunters and fishermen. A century after the battle of Xeres de la Frontera, the half-savage followers of Musa and Tarik had founded high schools of science and industry. And, as the fairest flower springs from the hardy thorn, the brightest flowers of art and poetry have immortalized the lands of heroic freemen, rather than of languid dreamers. The same nation that carried the banners of freedom through the battle-storm of Marathon and Salamis, adorned its temples with the sculptures of Phidias and its literature with the masterpieces of Sophocles and Simonides.Physical vigor is also the best guarantee of longevity. Nature exempts the children of the south from many cares; yet in the stern climes of the higher latitudes Health seems to make her favorite home; in spite of snowstorms and bitter frosts the robust Scandinavian outlives the languid Italian.In spiteof a rigorous climate, I say, for that his length of life is the reward of hardy habits is proved by the not less remarkable longevity of the hardy Arab and the manful Circassian, in climes that differ from that of Norway as Mexico and Virginia differ from Labrador. Men of steeled sinews overcome disease[38]as they brave the perils of wars and the hardships of the wilderness; hospital-surgeons know how readily the semi-savages of a primitive borderland recover from injuries that would send the effeminate city-dweller to the land of the shades. Toil-hardened laborers, too, share such immunities. On the 25th of March, 1887, Thomas McGuire, the foreman of a number of laborers employed at thenight-shiftof the Croton Aqueduct, fell to the bottom of the pit, a distance of ninety-five feet, and was drawn up in a comatose condition, literally drenched in his own blood. At the Bellevue Hospital (city of New York) the examining surgeon found him still alive, but gave him up for lost when he ascertained the extent of his injuries. Both his arms were broken near the shoulder, both thighs were fractured, his skull was horribly shattered about the left temple and frontal region, six of his ribs were broken and their splinters driven into the lungs. There seemed no hope whatever for him, and, after the administration of an anesthetic, he was put in a cot and left alone to die. To the utter surprise of the attending surgeon, the next morning found the mass of broken bones still breathing. His fever subsided; he survived a series of desperate operations, survived an apparently fatal hemorrhage, and continued to improve from day to day, till about the middle of June he recovered his complete consciousness, and was able to sit up and answer the questions of the medical men who, in ever increasing numbers, had visited his bedside for the last three weeks. As a newspaper correspondent sums up his case: “His strong constitution had[39]repulsed the assaults of death, till finally the grim monster went away to seek a less obstinate victim.” And, moreover, the exercise of athletic sports lessens the danger of such accidents: a trained gymnast will preserve his equilibrium where a weakling would break his neck.According to the mythus of the Nature-worshiping Greeks, the darling of Venus was a hunter (not a tailor or a hair-dresser), and the gift of beauty is, indeed, bestowed on the lovers of health-giving sports, far oftener than on the votaries of fashion. Supreme beauty is country-bred; the daughters of peasants, of village squires, of fox-hunting barons, have again and again eclipsed the galaxies of court belles. Country boys have won hearts that seemed proof against the charm of city gallants. “I have seen many a handsome man in my time,” says old Mrs. Montague in Barry Cornwall’s “Table Talk,” “but never such a pair of eyes as young Robbie Burns kept flashing from under his beautiful brow.” “Women will condone many a moral blemish in a suitor,” says Arthur Schopenhauer; “they will pardon rudeness, egotism, and intellectual poverty; they will forgive even homeliness sooner than effeminacy. Instinct seems to tell them thatin the result of marriage a mother’s influence can neutralize any defect but that.”[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The history of Antinaturalism is the history of a persistent war against the manlier instincts of the human race. Buddha and his Galilean disciples[40]considered the body the enemy of the soul. According to their system of ethics, Nature and all natural instincts are wholly evil; the renunciation of earth and all earthly hopes is their price of salvation, and the chief endeavor of their insane zeal is directed against the interests of the human body. The gospel of Buddha Sakiamuni, and its revamp, the “New Testament” of the Galilean messiah, abound with the ravings of ananti-physicalfanaticism as unknown to the ethics of the manly Hebrews as to the philosophy of the earth-loving Greeks and Romans. The duty of physical education and health-culture was entirely ignored in the gospel of the life-despising Nazarene. “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” was the ideal of the Grecian philosopher. A world-renouncing mind in a crushed body, was the ideal of the Christian moralists. The sculptors and painters of the Middle Ages vied in the representation of cadaverous saints, hollow-eyed devotees, and ghastly self-torturers. Physical training was tolerated as a secular evil indispensable for such purposes of the militant church as the hunting of heretics and the invasion of Mussulman empires; but its essential importance was vehemently disclaimed; the superior merit of sacrificing health to the interests of a body-despising soul was constantly commended, and the founders of the monastic orders that superseded the pagan schools of philosophy did not hesitate to enforce their dogmas by aggressive measures; the wretched convent slaves had to submit to weekly bleedings and strength-reducing penances; their novices were barbarously scourged for the clandestine indulgence of a lingering[41]love for health-giving sports—wrestling in the vacant halls of their cloister-prison, or racing conies on their way to their begging-grounds. The Olympic festivals were suppressed by order of a Christian emperor. The fathers of the church lost no opportunity to inveigh with rancorous invectives against the pagan culture of the manly powers, “so inimical to true contriteness of spirit and meek submission to the yoke of the gospel.” The followers of Origenes actually practicedcastrationas the most effectual means of taming the stubborn instincts of unregenerate boys. Their exemplar, who had recommended that plan for years, came at last to suspect the necessity of eradicating a germ of worldliness in his own mind, and proceeded to accomplish that purpose by emasculating himself. The anti-physical principle of European Buddhism manifests itself likewise in the fanaticism of the Scotch ascetics who raged against the scant physical recreations of a people already sufficiently afflicted by climatic vicissitudes and the parsimony of an indigent soil. It still survives in the bigotry of those modern zealots who groan at sight of a horse-race or wrestling-match, and would fain suppress the undue worldliness of ball-playing children. Manly pastimes were banished from the very dreams of a world to come; and while the heroes of Walhalla contest the prizes of martial sports, and the guests of Olympus share in the joyful festivals of the gods, the saints of our priest-blighted heaven need the alternative of an eternal hell to enjoy the prospect of an everlasting Sabbath-school.[42]Trials of strength and of skill,Rewarded by festive assemblies,Feasts in the halls of gods, where the voice of the musesAnswered in songs to the ravishing lyre of Apollo,quotes a German poet from the Vulgata, “when suddenly,” he adds, “a gaunt, blood-streaming Jew rushed in with a crown of thorns on his head and a huge wooden cross on his shoulder, which cross he dashed on the banquet table of the appalled gods, who turned paler and paler till they finally faded away into a pallid mist. And a dreary time then began; the world turned chill and bleak. The merry gods had departed; Olympus became aGolgotha, where sickly, skinned, and roasted deities sneaked about mournfully, nursing their wounds and chanting doleful hymns. Religion, once a worship of joy, became a whining worship of sorrow.”[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.But Nature had her revenge, and the despisers of their own bodies became so truly contemptible that in comparison the rudest barbarians of antiquity seemed respectable men. The neglect of physical exercise avenged itself in loathsome diseases, the perverted instincts exploded in vices; the monkish self-abasers became caricatures of manhood: bloated, whining, mean, and viciously sensual wretches, the laughing-stock of foreign nations and the curse and disgrace of their own. Physically, mentally, and morally, the earth-despising convent drone represented the vilest type of degeneration to which the manhood of our race has ever been degraded, and the[43]enforced veneration of such monsters, as exemplars of perfection, has perverted the ethical standards of mankind to a degree for which our present generation is as yet far from having wholly recovered. The love of athletic recreations is still smirched with the stigma of the Middle Ages; “respectability” is too often mistaken for a synonym of pedantry and conventional effeminacy; parents still frown upon the health-giving sports of their children; vice still sneaks in the disguise of saintliness and world-renouncing aversion to physical recreations.The degeneration of many once manful races has reached an incurable phase: the listless resignation to physical abasement and decrepitude. Earth has spurned her despisers; millions of priest-slaves in southern Europe have lost the inheritance of their fathers, and have to till the soil for aliens and despots. The arbitrament of war has made them taste the lowest dregs of national humiliation; the life-long worshipers of whining saints appealed in vain to the God of Battles, and were forced to eat dust at the feet of the despised Infidel and heretic. The ships of the Spanish Armada were consecrated by a chorus of ranting priests commending them to the miraculous protection of heaven; and heaven’s answer came in the blast of the hurricane that buried their fleet in the depths of the sea. The same nation once more invoked the aid of the saints for the protection of an armament against the great naval powers of the nineteenth century. The ships were ceremoniously baptized with the most fulsomely pious names: “The Holy Savior of the World,” “Saint Maria,” “Saint[44]Joseph,” “The Most Holy Trinity,” and sent forth in full reliance on the protection of supernatural agencies. But in the encounter with Nelson’s self-relying veterans the sacred bubble at once collapsed. St. Joseph’s impotence howled in vain for the assistance of the Holy Ghost. The Savior of the World could save himself only by a shameful flight, and the Most Holy Trinity succumbed to a decided surplus of holes.[Contents]E.—REDEMPTION.In the work of physical regeneration Nature meets the reformer more than half-way. Our children need but little encouragement to break the fetters of the fatuous restraint that dooms them to a life of physical apathy. They ask nothing but time and opportunity to redeem the coming generation from the stigma of unmanliness and debility. Physical and intellectual education should again go hand in hand if we would promote the happiness of a redeemed race on the plan that made the age of Grecian philosophy and gymnastics the brightest era in the history of mankind. Physical reform should be promoted by the systematic encouragement of athletic sports; every township should have a free gymnasium, every village a free foot-race park; by prize-offers for supremacy in competitive gymnastics wealthy philanthropists could turn thousands of boy topers into young athletes. We should have athletic county meetings, state field-days, and national or international Olympiads.Educational ethics should fully recognize the[45]rights of the body. We should admit the unorthodox, but also undeniable, truth that an upright and magnanimous disposition is a concomitant of bodily strength, while fickleness, duplicity, and querulous injustice are the characteristics of debility. We should teach our children that a healthy mind can dwell only in a healthy body, and that he who pretends to find no time to take care of his health is a workman who thinks it a waste of time to take care of his tools.

CHAPTER II.STRENGTH.

[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.Bodily vigor is the basis of mental and physical health. Strength is power, and the instinctive love of invigorating exercise manifests itself in the young of all but the lowest brutes. The bigot who undermines the health of his children by stinting their outdoor sport as “worldly vanity,” and “exercise that profiteth but little,” is shamed by animals who lead their young in races and trials of strength. Thus the female fox will train her cubs; the doe will race and romp with her fawn, the mare with her colt. Monkeys (like the squirrels of our northern forests) can be seen running up and down a tree and leaping from branch to branch, without any conceivable purpose but the enjoyment of the exercise itself; dogs run races, young lions wrestle and paw each other in a playful trial of prowess; even birds can be seen sporting in the air, and dolphins on the play-fields of the ocean. In nearly all classes of the vertebrate animals the rivalry of the males is decided by a trial of strength, and the female unhesitatingly accepts the victor as the fittest representative of his species.Normal children are passionately fond of athletic sports. In western Yucatan I saw Indian girls climb[34]trees with the agility of a spider-monkey, and laughingly pelt each other with the fruits of the Adansonia fig. The children of the South-sea Islanders vie in aquatic gymnastics. Spartan girls joined in the foot-races of their brothers, and by the laws of Lycurgus were not permitted to marry till they had attained a prescribed degree of proficiency in a number of athletic exercises. Race-running and wrestling were the favorite pastimes of young Romans in the undegenerate age of the republic; and, in spite of all restraints, similar propensities still manifest themselves in our school-boys. They pass the intervals of their study-hours in competitive athletics, rather than in listless inactivity, and brave frosts and snowstorms to get the benefit of outdoor exercise even in midwinter. They love health-giving sports for their own sake, as if instinctively aware that bodily strength will further every victory in the arena of life.The enthusiasm that gathered about the heroic games of Olympia made those festivals the brightest days in the springtime of the human race. The million-voiced cheers that hailed the victor of thepentathlonhave never been heard again on earth since the manliest and noblest of all recreations were suppressed by order of a crowned bigot. The rapture of competitive athletics is a bond which can obliterate the rancor of all baser rivalries, and still unites hostile tribes in the arena of pure manhood: as in Algiers, where the Bedouins joined in the gymnastic prize-games of their French foemen: the same foemen whose banquets they would have refused to share even at the bidding of starvation. In Buda-Pesth I once[35]witnessed a performance of the German athlete Weitzel, and still remember the irrepressible enthusiasm of two broad-shouldered Turks who crowded to the edge of the platform, and, with waving kerchiefs, joined in the cheers of the uncircumcised spectators.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The “survival of the fittest” means, in many important respects, the survival of the strongest. In a state of nature weakly animals yield to their stronger rivals; the stoutest lion, the swiftest tiger, has a superior chance of obtaining prey; the stouter bulls of the herd defy the attack of the wolves who overcome the resistance of the weaker individuals; the fleetest deer has the best chance to escape the pursuit of the hunter.A state of civilization does only apparently equalize such differences. The invention of gunpowder has armed the weak with the power of a giant; but the issue of international wars will always be biased by the comparative strength of sinew and steadiness of nerve of the men that handle those improved weapons. In the last Franco-Prussian war the French were favored by an undoubted superiority of arms, but they were utterly beaten by a nation whose sons had devoted their youth to gymnastics. The arms of the Gothic giants were of the rudest description: hunting-spears and clumsy battle-axes; but those axes broke the ranks of the Roman legionaries, with their polished swords and elaborate tactics. For the last two thousand years the wars[36]that decided the international rivalries of Asia, Europe, and North America nearly always ended with the victory of a northern nation over its southern neighbors. The men of the north could not always boast a superiority in science or arms, nor in number, nor in the advantage of a popular cause; but the rigor of their climate exacts a valiant effort in the struggle for existence, and steels the nerves even of an otherwise inferior race. “Fortis Fortuna adjuvat,” said a Roman proverb, which means literally that Fortune favors thestrong, and which has been well rendered in the paraphrase of a modern translator: “Force begets fortitude and conquers fortune.” Nor is that bias of fate confined to the battles of war. In the contests of peace, too, other things being equal, the strong arm will prevail against the weak, the stout heart against the faint. Bodily strength begets self-reliance. “Blest are thestrong, for they shall possess the kingdom of the earth,” would be an improved variation of the gospel text. The Germanic nations (including the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon) who have most faithfully preserved the once universal love of manly sports, have prevailed against their rivals in the arena of industry and science, as well as of war.An American manufacturer, who established a branch of his business at Havre, France, hired American and British workmen at double wages, maintaining that he found it the cheapest plan, since one of his expensive laborers could do the work of three natives. In the seaport towns, even of South America and Southern Europe, a British sailor[37]is always at a premium. American industry is steadily forcing its way further south, and may yet come to limit the fields of its enterprise only by the boundaries of the American continent. From the smallest beginnings, a nation of iron-fisted rustics has repeatedly risen to supremacy in arms and arts. Two hundred years before the era of Norman conquests in France, Italy, and Great Britain, the natives of Norway were but a race of hardy hunters and fishermen. A century after the battle of Xeres de la Frontera, the half-savage followers of Musa and Tarik had founded high schools of science and industry. And, as the fairest flower springs from the hardy thorn, the brightest flowers of art and poetry have immortalized the lands of heroic freemen, rather than of languid dreamers. The same nation that carried the banners of freedom through the battle-storm of Marathon and Salamis, adorned its temples with the sculptures of Phidias and its literature with the masterpieces of Sophocles and Simonides.Physical vigor is also the best guarantee of longevity. Nature exempts the children of the south from many cares; yet in the stern climes of the higher latitudes Health seems to make her favorite home; in spite of snowstorms and bitter frosts the robust Scandinavian outlives the languid Italian.In spiteof a rigorous climate, I say, for that his length of life is the reward of hardy habits is proved by the not less remarkable longevity of the hardy Arab and the manful Circassian, in climes that differ from that of Norway as Mexico and Virginia differ from Labrador. Men of steeled sinews overcome disease[38]as they brave the perils of wars and the hardships of the wilderness; hospital-surgeons know how readily the semi-savages of a primitive borderland recover from injuries that would send the effeminate city-dweller to the land of the shades. Toil-hardened laborers, too, share such immunities. On the 25th of March, 1887, Thomas McGuire, the foreman of a number of laborers employed at thenight-shiftof the Croton Aqueduct, fell to the bottom of the pit, a distance of ninety-five feet, and was drawn up in a comatose condition, literally drenched in his own blood. At the Bellevue Hospital (city of New York) the examining surgeon found him still alive, but gave him up for lost when he ascertained the extent of his injuries. Both his arms were broken near the shoulder, both thighs were fractured, his skull was horribly shattered about the left temple and frontal region, six of his ribs were broken and their splinters driven into the lungs. There seemed no hope whatever for him, and, after the administration of an anesthetic, he was put in a cot and left alone to die. To the utter surprise of the attending surgeon, the next morning found the mass of broken bones still breathing. His fever subsided; he survived a series of desperate operations, survived an apparently fatal hemorrhage, and continued to improve from day to day, till about the middle of June he recovered his complete consciousness, and was able to sit up and answer the questions of the medical men who, in ever increasing numbers, had visited his bedside for the last three weeks. As a newspaper correspondent sums up his case: “His strong constitution had[39]repulsed the assaults of death, till finally the grim monster went away to seek a less obstinate victim.” And, moreover, the exercise of athletic sports lessens the danger of such accidents: a trained gymnast will preserve his equilibrium where a weakling would break his neck.According to the mythus of the Nature-worshiping Greeks, the darling of Venus was a hunter (not a tailor or a hair-dresser), and the gift of beauty is, indeed, bestowed on the lovers of health-giving sports, far oftener than on the votaries of fashion. Supreme beauty is country-bred; the daughters of peasants, of village squires, of fox-hunting barons, have again and again eclipsed the galaxies of court belles. Country boys have won hearts that seemed proof against the charm of city gallants. “I have seen many a handsome man in my time,” says old Mrs. Montague in Barry Cornwall’s “Table Talk,” “but never such a pair of eyes as young Robbie Burns kept flashing from under his beautiful brow.” “Women will condone many a moral blemish in a suitor,” says Arthur Schopenhauer; “they will pardon rudeness, egotism, and intellectual poverty; they will forgive even homeliness sooner than effeminacy. Instinct seems to tell them thatin the result of marriage a mother’s influence can neutralize any defect but that.”[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The history of Antinaturalism is the history of a persistent war against the manlier instincts of the human race. Buddha and his Galilean disciples[40]considered the body the enemy of the soul. According to their system of ethics, Nature and all natural instincts are wholly evil; the renunciation of earth and all earthly hopes is their price of salvation, and the chief endeavor of their insane zeal is directed against the interests of the human body. The gospel of Buddha Sakiamuni, and its revamp, the “New Testament” of the Galilean messiah, abound with the ravings of ananti-physicalfanaticism as unknown to the ethics of the manly Hebrews as to the philosophy of the earth-loving Greeks and Romans. The duty of physical education and health-culture was entirely ignored in the gospel of the life-despising Nazarene. “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” was the ideal of the Grecian philosopher. A world-renouncing mind in a crushed body, was the ideal of the Christian moralists. The sculptors and painters of the Middle Ages vied in the representation of cadaverous saints, hollow-eyed devotees, and ghastly self-torturers. Physical training was tolerated as a secular evil indispensable for such purposes of the militant church as the hunting of heretics and the invasion of Mussulman empires; but its essential importance was vehemently disclaimed; the superior merit of sacrificing health to the interests of a body-despising soul was constantly commended, and the founders of the monastic orders that superseded the pagan schools of philosophy did not hesitate to enforce their dogmas by aggressive measures; the wretched convent slaves had to submit to weekly bleedings and strength-reducing penances; their novices were barbarously scourged for the clandestine indulgence of a lingering[41]love for health-giving sports—wrestling in the vacant halls of their cloister-prison, or racing conies on their way to their begging-grounds. The Olympic festivals were suppressed by order of a Christian emperor. The fathers of the church lost no opportunity to inveigh with rancorous invectives against the pagan culture of the manly powers, “so inimical to true contriteness of spirit and meek submission to the yoke of the gospel.” The followers of Origenes actually practicedcastrationas the most effectual means of taming the stubborn instincts of unregenerate boys. Their exemplar, who had recommended that plan for years, came at last to suspect the necessity of eradicating a germ of worldliness in his own mind, and proceeded to accomplish that purpose by emasculating himself. The anti-physical principle of European Buddhism manifests itself likewise in the fanaticism of the Scotch ascetics who raged against the scant physical recreations of a people already sufficiently afflicted by climatic vicissitudes and the parsimony of an indigent soil. It still survives in the bigotry of those modern zealots who groan at sight of a horse-race or wrestling-match, and would fain suppress the undue worldliness of ball-playing children. Manly pastimes were banished from the very dreams of a world to come; and while the heroes of Walhalla contest the prizes of martial sports, and the guests of Olympus share in the joyful festivals of the gods, the saints of our priest-blighted heaven need the alternative of an eternal hell to enjoy the prospect of an everlasting Sabbath-school.[42]Trials of strength and of skill,Rewarded by festive assemblies,Feasts in the halls of gods, where the voice of the musesAnswered in songs to the ravishing lyre of Apollo,quotes a German poet from the Vulgata, “when suddenly,” he adds, “a gaunt, blood-streaming Jew rushed in with a crown of thorns on his head and a huge wooden cross on his shoulder, which cross he dashed on the banquet table of the appalled gods, who turned paler and paler till they finally faded away into a pallid mist. And a dreary time then began; the world turned chill and bleak. The merry gods had departed; Olympus became aGolgotha, where sickly, skinned, and roasted deities sneaked about mournfully, nursing their wounds and chanting doleful hymns. Religion, once a worship of joy, became a whining worship of sorrow.”[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.But Nature had her revenge, and the despisers of their own bodies became so truly contemptible that in comparison the rudest barbarians of antiquity seemed respectable men. The neglect of physical exercise avenged itself in loathsome diseases, the perverted instincts exploded in vices; the monkish self-abasers became caricatures of manhood: bloated, whining, mean, and viciously sensual wretches, the laughing-stock of foreign nations and the curse and disgrace of their own. Physically, mentally, and morally, the earth-despising convent drone represented the vilest type of degeneration to which the manhood of our race has ever been degraded, and the[43]enforced veneration of such monsters, as exemplars of perfection, has perverted the ethical standards of mankind to a degree for which our present generation is as yet far from having wholly recovered. The love of athletic recreations is still smirched with the stigma of the Middle Ages; “respectability” is too often mistaken for a synonym of pedantry and conventional effeminacy; parents still frown upon the health-giving sports of their children; vice still sneaks in the disguise of saintliness and world-renouncing aversion to physical recreations.The degeneration of many once manful races has reached an incurable phase: the listless resignation to physical abasement and decrepitude. Earth has spurned her despisers; millions of priest-slaves in southern Europe have lost the inheritance of their fathers, and have to till the soil for aliens and despots. The arbitrament of war has made them taste the lowest dregs of national humiliation; the life-long worshipers of whining saints appealed in vain to the God of Battles, and were forced to eat dust at the feet of the despised Infidel and heretic. The ships of the Spanish Armada were consecrated by a chorus of ranting priests commending them to the miraculous protection of heaven; and heaven’s answer came in the blast of the hurricane that buried their fleet in the depths of the sea. The same nation once more invoked the aid of the saints for the protection of an armament against the great naval powers of the nineteenth century. The ships were ceremoniously baptized with the most fulsomely pious names: “The Holy Savior of the World,” “Saint Maria,” “Saint[44]Joseph,” “The Most Holy Trinity,” and sent forth in full reliance on the protection of supernatural agencies. But in the encounter with Nelson’s self-relying veterans the sacred bubble at once collapsed. St. Joseph’s impotence howled in vain for the assistance of the Holy Ghost. The Savior of the World could save himself only by a shameful flight, and the Most Holy Trinity succumbed to a decided surplus of holes.[Contents]E.—REDEMPTION.In the work of physical regeneration Nature meets the reformer more than half-way. Our children need but little encouragement to break the fetters of the fatuous restraint that dooms them to a life of physical apathy. They ask nothing but time and opportunity to redeem the coming generation from the stigma of unmanliness and debility. Physical and intellectual education should again go hand in hand if we would promote the happiness of a redeemed race on the plan that made the age of Grecian philosophy and gymnastics the brightest era in the history of mankind. Physical reform should be promoted by the systematic encouragement of athletic sports; every township should have a free gymnasium, every village a free foot-race park; by prize-offers for supremacy in competitive gymnastics wealthy philanthropists could turn thousands of boy topers into young athletes. We should have athletic county meetings, state field-days, and national or international Olympiads.Educational ethics should fully recognize the[45]rights of the body. We should admit the unorthodox, but also undeniable, truth that an upright and magnanimous disposition is a concomitant of bodily strength, while fickleness, duplicity, and querulous injustice are the characteristics of debility. We should teach our children that a healthy mind can dwell only in a healthy body, and that he who pretends to find no time to take care of his health is a workman who thinks it a waste of time to take care of his tools.

A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

Bodily vigor is the basis of mental and physical health. Strength is power, and the instinctive love of invigorating exercise manifests itself in the young of all but the lowest brutes. The bigot who undermines the health of his children by stinting their outdoor sport as “worldly vanity,” and “exercise that profiteth but little,” is shamed by animals who lead their young in races and trials of strength. Thus the female fox will train her cubs; the doe will race and romp with her fawn, the mare with her colt. Monkeys (like the squirrels of our northern forests) can be seen running up and down a tree and leaping from branch to branch, without any conceivable purpose but the enjoyment of the exercise itself; dogs run races, young lions wrestle and paw each other in a playful trial of prowess; even birds can be seen sporting in the air, and dolphins on the play-fields of the ocean. In nearly all classes of the vertebrate animals the rivalry of the males is decided by a trial of strength, and the female unhesitatingly accepts the victor as the fittest representative of his species.Normal children are passionately fond of athletic sports. In western Yucatan I saw Indian girls climb[34]trees with the agility of a spider-monkey, and laughingly pelt each other with the fruits of the Adansonia fig. The children of the South-sea Islanders vie in aquatic gymnastics. Spartan girls joined in the foot-races of their brothers, and by the laws of Lycurgus were not permitted to marry till they had attained a prescribed degree of proficiency in a number of athletic exercises. Race-running and wrestling were the favorite pastimes of young Romans in the undegenerate age of the republic; and, in spite of all restraints, similar propensities still manifest themselves in our school-boys. They pass the intervals of their study-hours in competitive athletics, rather than in listless inactivity, and brave frosts and snowstorms to get the benefit of outdoor exercise even in midwinter. They love health-giving sports for their own sake, as if instinctively aware that bodily strength will further every victory in the arena of life.The enthusiasm that gathered about the heroic games of Olympia made those festivals the brightest days in the springtime of the human race. The million-voiced cheers that hailed the victor of thepentathlonhave never been heard again on earth since the manliest and noblest of all recreations were suppressed by order of a crowned bigot. The rapture of competitive athletics is a bond which can obliterate the rancor of all baser rivalries, and still unites hostile tribes in the arena of pure manhood: as in Algiers, where the Bedouins joined in the gymnastic prize-games of their French foemen: the same foemen whose banquets they would have refused to share even at the bidding of starvation. In Buda-Pesth I once[35]witnessed a performance of the German athlete Weitzel, and still remember the irrepressible enthusiasm of two broad-shouldered Turks who crowded to the edge of the platform, and, with waving kerchiefs, joined in the cheers of the uncircumcised spectators.

Normal children are passionately fond of athletic sports. In western Yucatan I saw Indian girls climb[34]trees with the agility of a spider-monkey, and laughingly pelt each other with the fruits of the Adansonia fig. The children of the South-sea Islanders vie in aquatic gymnastics. Spartan girls joined in the foot-races of their brothers, and by the laws of Lycurgus were not permitted to marry till they had attained a prescribed degree of proficiency in a number of athletic exercises. Race-running and wrestling were the favorite pastimes of young Romans in the undegenerate age of the republic; and, in spite of all restraints, similar propensities still manifest themselves in our school-boys. They pass the intervals of their study-hours in competitive athletics, rather than in listless inactivity, and brave frosts and snowstorms to get the benefit of outdoor exercise even in midwinter. They love health-giving sports for their own sake, as if instinctively aware that bodily strength will further every victory in the arena of life.

The enthusiasm that gathered about the heroic games of Olympia made those festivals the brightest days in the springtime of the human race. The million-voiced cheers that hailed the victor of thepentathlonhave never been heard again on earth since the manliest and noblest of all recreations were suppressed by order of a crowned bigot. The rapture of competitive athletics is a bond which can obliterate the rancor of all baser rivalries, and still unites hostile tribes in the arena of pure manhood: as in Algiers, where the Bedouins joined in the gymnastic prize-games of their French foemen: the same foemen whose banquets they would have refused to share even at the bidding of starvation. In Buda-Pesth I once[35]witnessed a performance of the German athlete Weitzel, and still remember the irrepressible enthusiasm of two broad-shouldered Turks who crowded to the edge of the platform, and, with waving kerchiefs, joined in the cheers of the uncircumcised spectators.

[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The “survival of the fittest” means, in many important respects, the survival of the strongest. In a state of nature weakly animals yield to their stronger rivals; the stoutest lion, the swiftest tiger, has a superior chance of obtaining prey; the stouter bulls of the herd defy the attack of the wolves who overcome the resistance of the weaker individuals; the fleetest deer has the best chance to escape the pursuit of the hunter.A state of civilization does only apparently equalize such differences. The invention of gunpowder has armed the weak with the power of a giant; but the issue of international wars will always be biased by the comparative strength of sinew and steadiness of nerve of the men that handle those improved weapons. In the last Franco-Prussian war the French were favored by an undoubted superiority of arms, but they were utterly beaten by a nation whose sons had devoted their youth to gymnastics. The arms of the Gothic giants were of the rudest description: hunting-spears and clumsy battle-axes; but those axes broke the ranks of the Roman legionaries, with their polished swords and elaborate tactics. For the last two thousand years the wars[36]that decided the international rivalries of Asia, Europe, and North America nearly always ended with the victory of a northern nation over its southern neighbors. The men of the north could not always boast a superiority in science or arms, nor in number, nor in the advantage of a popular cause; but the rigor of their climate exacts a valiant effort in the struggle for existence, and steels the nerves even of an otherwise inferior race. “Fortis Fortuna adjuvat,” said a Roman proverb, which means literally that Fortune favors thestrong, and which has been well rendered in the paraphrase of a modern translator: “Force begets fortitude and conquers fortune.” Nor is that bias of fate confined to the battles of war. In the contests of peace, too, other things being equal, the strong arm will prevail against the weak, the stout heart against the faint. Bodily strength begets self-reliance. “Blest are thestrong, for they shall possess the kingdom of the earth,” would be an improved variation of the gospel text. The Germanic nations (including the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon) who have most faithfully preserved the once universal love of manly sports, have prevailed against their rivals in the arena of industry and science, as well as of war.An American manufacturer, who established a branch of his business at Havre, France, hired American and British workmen at double wages, maintaining that he found it the cheapest plan, since one of his expensive laborers could do the work of three natives. In the seaport towns, even of South America and Southern Europe, a British sailor[37]is always at a premium. American industry is steadily forcing its way further south, and may yet come to limit the fields of its enterprise only by the boundaries of the American continent. From the smallest beginnings, a nation of iron-fisted rustics has repeatedly risen to supremacy in arms and arts. Two hundred years before the era of Norman conquests in France, Italy, and Great Britain, the natives of Norway were but a race of hardy hunters and fishermen. A century after the battle of Xeres de la Frontera, the half-savage followers of Musa and Tarik had founded high schools of science and industry. And, as the fairest flower springs from the hardy thorn, the brightest flowers of art and poetry have immortalized the lands of heroic freemen, rather than of languid dreamers. The same nation that carried the banners of freedom through the battle-storm of Marathon and Salamis, adorned its temples with the sculptures of Phidias and its literature with the masterpieces of Sophocles and Simonides.Physical vigor is also the best guarantee of longevity. Nature exempts the children of the south from many cares; yet in the stern climes of the higher latitudes Health seems to make her favorite home; in spite of snowstorms and bitter frosts the robust Scandinavian outlives the languid Italian.In spiteof a rigorous climate, I say, for that his length of life is the reward of hardy habits is proved by the not less remarkable longevity of the hardy Arab and the manful Circassian, in climes that differ from that of Norway as Mexico and Virginia differ from Labrador. Men of steeled sinews overcome disease[38]as they brave the perils of wars and the hardships of the wilderness; hospital-surgeons know how readily the semi-savages of a primitive borderland recover from injuries that would send the effeminate city-dweller to the land of the shades. Toil-hardened laborers, too, share such immunities. On the 25th of March, 1887, Thomas McGuire, the foreman of a number of laborers employed at thenight-shiftof the Croton Aqueduct, fell to the bottom of the pit, a distance of ninety-five feet, and was drawn up in a comatose condition, literally drenched in his own blood. At the Bellevue Hospital (city of New York) the examining surgeon found him still alive, but gave him up for lost when he ascertained the extent of his injuries. Both his arms were broken near the shoulder, both thighs were fractured, his skull was horribly shattered about the left temple and frontal region, six of his ribs were broken and their splinters driven into the lungs. There seemed no hope whatever for him, and, after the administration of an anesthetic, he was put in a cot and left alone to die. To the utter surprise of the attending surgeon, the next morning found the mass of broken bones still breathing. His fever subsided; he survived a series of desperate operations, survived an apparently fatal hemorrhage, and continued to improve from day to day, till about the middle of June he recovered his complete consciousness, and was able to sit up and answer the questions of the medical men who, in ever increasing numbers, had visited his bedside for the last three weeks. As a newspaper correspondent sums up his case: “His strong constitution had[39]repulsed the assaults of death, till finally the grim monster went away to seek a less obstinate victim.” And, moreover, the exercise of athletic sports lessens the danger of such accidents: a trained gymnast will preserve his equilibrium where a weakling would break his neck.According to the mythus of the Nature-worshiping Greeks, the darling of Venus was a hunter (not a tailor or a hair-dresser), and the gift of beauty is, indeed, bestowed on the lovers of health-giving sports, far oftener than on the votaries of fashion. Supreme beauty is country-bred; the daughters of peasants, of village squires, of fox-hunting barons, have again and again eclipsed the galaxies of court belles. Country boys have won hearts that seemed proof against the charm of city gallants. “I have seen many a handsome man in my time,” says old Mrs. Montague in Barry Cornwall’s “Table Talk,” “but never such a pair of eyes as young Robbie Burns kept flashing from under his beautiful brow.” “Women will condone many a moral blemish in a suitor,” says Arthur Schopenhauer; “they will pardon rudeness, egotism, and intellectual poverty; they will forgive even homeliness sooner than effeminacy. Instinct seems to tell them thatin the result of marriage a mother’s influence can neutralize any defect but that.”

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

The “survival of the fittest” means, in many important respects, the survival of the strongest. In a state of nature weakly animals yield to their stronger rivals; the stoutest lion, the swiftest tiger, has a superior chance of obtaining prey; the stouter bulls of the herd defy the attack of the wolves who overcome the resistance of the weaker individuals; the fleetest deer has the best chance to escape the pursuit of the hunter.A state of civilization does only apparently equalize such differences. The invention of gunpowder has armed the weak with the power of a giant; but the issue of international wars will always be biased by the comparative strength of sinew and steadiness of nerve of the men that handle those improved weapons. In the last Franco-Prussian war the French were favored by an undoubted superiority of arms, but they were utterly beaten by a nation whose sons had devoted their youth to gymnastics. The arms of the Gothic giants were of the rudest description: hunting-spears and clumsy battle-axes; but those axes broke the ranks of the Roman legionaries, with their polished swords and elaborate tactics. For the last two thousand years the wars[36]that decided the international rivalries of Asia, Europe, and North America nearly always ended with the victory of a northern nation over its southern neighbors. The men of the north could not always boast a superiority in science or arms, nor in number, nor in the advantage of a popular cause; but the rigor of their climate exacts a valiant effort in the struggle for existence, and steels the nerves even of an otherwise inferior race. “Fortis Fortuna adjuvat,” said a Roman proverb, which means literally that Fortune favors thestrong, and which has been well rendered in the paraphrase of a modern translator: “Force begets fortitude and conquers fortune.” Nor is that bias of fate confined to the battles of war. In the contests of peace, too, other things being equal, the strong arm will prevail against the weak, the stout heart against the faint. Bodily strength begets self-reliance. “Blest are thestrong, for they shall possess the kingdom of the earth,” would be an improved variation of the gospel text. The Germanic nations (including the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon) who have most faithfully preserved the once universal love of manly sports, have prevailed against their rivals in the arena of industry and science, as well as of war.An American manufacturer, who established a branch of his business at Havre, France, hired American and British workmen at double wages, maintaining that he found it the cheapest plan, since one of his expensive laborers could do the work of three natives. In the seaport towns, even of South America and Southern Europe, a British sailor[37]is always at a premium. American industry is steadily forcing its way further south, and may yet come to limit the fields of its enterprise only by the boundaries of the American continent. From the smallest beginnings, a nation of iron-fisted rustics has repeatedly risen to supremacy in arms and arts. Two hundred years before the era of Norman conquests in France, Italy, and Great Britain, the natives of Norway were but a race of hardy hunters and fishermen. A century after the battle of Xeres de la Frontera, the half-savage followers of Musa and Tarik had founded high schools of science and industry. And, as the fairest flower springs from the hardy thorn, the brightest flowers of art and poetry have immortalized the lands of heroic freemen, rather than of languid dreamers. The same nation that carried the banners of freedom through the battle-storm of Marathon and Salamis, adorned its temples with the sculptures of Phidias and its literature with the masterpieces of Sophocles and Simonides.Physical vigor is also the best guarantee of longevity. Nature exempts the children of the south from many cares; yet in the stern climes of the higher latitudes Health seems to make her favorite home; in spite of snowstorms and bitter frosts the robust Scandinavian outlives the languid Italian.In spiteof a rigorous climate, I say, for that his length of life is the reward of hardy habits is proved by the not less remarkable longevity of the hardy Arab and the manful Circassian, in climes that differ from that of Norway as Mexico and Virginia differ from Labrador. Men of steeled sinews overcome disease[38]as they brave the perils of wars and the hardships of the wilderness; hospital-surgeons know how readily the semi-savages of a primitive borderland recover from injuries that would send the effeminate city-dweller to the land of the shades. Toil-hardened laborers, too, share such immunities. On the 25th of March, 1887, Thomas McGuire, the foreman of a number of laborers employed at thenight-shiftof the Croton Aqueduct, fell to the bottom of the pit, a distance of ninety-five feet, and was drawn up in a comatose condition, literally drenched in his own blood. At the Bellevue Hospital (city of New York) the examining surgeon found him still alive, but gave him up for lost when he ascertained the extent of his injuries. Both his arms were broken near the shoulder, both thighs were fractured, his skull was horribly shattered about the left temple and frontal region, six of his ribs were broken and their splinters driven into the lungs. There seemed no hope whatever for him, and, after the administration of an anesthetic, he was put in a cot and left alone to die. To the utter surprise of the attending surgeon, the next morning found the mass of broken bones still breathing. His fever subsided; he survived a series of desperate operations, survived an apparently fatal hemorrhage, and continued to improve from day to day, till about the middle of June he recovered his complete consciousness, and was able to sit up and answer the questions of the medical men who, in ever increasing numbers, had visited his bedside for the last three weeks. As a newspaper correspondent sums up his case: “His strong constitution had[39]repulsed the assaults of death, till finally the grim monster went away to seek a less obstinate victim.” And, moreover, the exercise of athletic sports lessens the danger of such accidents: a trained gymnast will preserve his equilibrium where a weakling would break his neck.According to the mythus of the Nature-worshiping Greeks, the darling of Venus was a hunter (not a tailor or a hair-dresser), and the gift of beauty is, indeed, bestowed on the lovers of health-giving sports, far oftener than on the votaries of fashion. Supreme beauty is country-bred; the daughters of peasants, of village squires, of fox-hunting barons, have again and again eclipsed the galaxies of court belles. Country boys have won hearts that seemed proof against the charm of city gallants. “I have seen many a handsome man in my time,” says old Mrs. Montague in Barry Cornwall’s “Table Talk,” “but never such a pair of eyes as young Robbie Burns kept flashing from under his beautiful brow.” “Women will condone many a moral blemish in a suitor,” says Arthur Schopenhauer; “they will pardon rudeness, egotism, and intellectual poverty; they will forgive even homeliness sooner than effeminacy. Instinct seems to tell them thatin the result of marriage a mother’s influence can neutralize any defect but that.”

A state of civilization does only apparently equalize such differences. The invention of gunpowder has armed the weak with the power of a giant; but the issue of international wars will always be biased by the comparative strength of sinew and steadiness of nerve of the men that handle those improved weapons. In the last Franco-Prussian war the French were favored by an undoubted superiority of arms, but they were utterly beaten by a nation whose sons had devoted their youth to gymnastics. The arms of the Gothic giants were of the rudest description: hunting-spears and clumsy battle-axes; but those axes broke the ranks of the Roman legionaries, with their polished swords and elaborate tactics. For the last two thousand years the wars[36]that decided the international rivalries of Asia, Europe, and North America nearly always ended with the victory of a northern nation over its southern neighbors. The men of the north could not always boast a superiority in science or arms, nor in number, nor in the advantage of a popular cause; but the rigor of their climate exacts a valiant effort in the struggle for existence, and steels the nerves even of an otherwise inferior race. “Fortis Fortuna adjuvat,” said a Roman proverb, which means literally that Fortune favors thestrong, and which has been well rendered in the paraphrase of a modern translator: “Force begets fortitude and conquers fortune.” Nor is that bias of fate confined to the battles of war. In the contests of peace, too, other things being equal, the strong arm will prevail against the weak, the stout heart against the faint. Bodily strength begets self-reliance. “Blest are thestrong, for they shall possess the kingdom of the earth,” would be an improved variation of the gospel text. The Germanic nations (including the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon) who have most faithfully preserved the once universal love of manly sports, have prevailed against their rivals in the arena of industry and science, as well as of war.

An American manufacturer, who established a branch of his business at Havre, France, hired American and British workmen at double wages, maintaining that he found it the cheapest plan, since one of his expensive laborers could do the work of three natives. In the seaport towns, even of South America and Southern Europe, a British sailor[37]is always at a premium. American industry is steadily forcing its way further south, and may yet come to limit the fields of its enterprise only by the boundaries of the American continent. From the smallest beginnings, a nation of iron-fisted rustics has repeatedly risen to supremacy in arms and arts. Two hundred years before the era of Norman conquests in France, Italy, and Great Britain, the natives of Norway were but a race of hardy hunters and fishermen. A century after the battle of Xeres de la Frontera, the half-savage followers of Musa and Tarik had founded high schools of science and industry. And, as the fairest flower springs from the hardy thorn, the brightest flowers of art and poetry have immortalized the lands of heroic freemen, rather than of languid dreamers. The same nation that carried the banners of freedom through the battle-storm of Marathon and Salamis, adorned its temples with the sculptures of Phidias and its literature with the masterpieces of Sophocles and Simonides.

Physical vigor is also the best guarantee of longevity. Nature exempts the children of the south from many cares; yet in the stern climes of the higher latitudes Health seems to make her favorite home; in spite of snowstorms and bitter frosts the robust Scandinavian outlives the languid Italian.In spiteof a rigorous climate, I say, for that his length of life is the reward of hardy habits is proved by the not less remarkable longevity of the hardy Arab and the manful Circassian, in climes that differ from that of Norway as Mexico and Virginia differ from Labrador. Men of steeled sinews overcome disease[38]as they brave the perils of wars and the hardships of the wilderness; hospital-surgeons know how readily the semi-savages of a primitive borderland recover from injuries that would send the effeminate city-dweller to the land of the shades. Toil-hardened laborers, too, share such immunities. On the 25th of March, 1887, Thomas McGuire, the foreman of a number of laborers employed at thenight-shiftof the Croton Aqueduct, fell to the bottom of the pit, a distance of ninety-five feet, and was drawn up in a comatose condition, literally drenched in his own blood. At the Bellevue Hospital (city of New York) the examining surgeon found him still alive, but gave him up for lost when he ascertained the extent of his injuries. Both his arms were broken near the shoulder, both thighs were fractured, his skull was horribly shattered about the left temple and frontal region, six of his ribs were broken and their splinters driven into the lungs. There seemed no hope whatever for him, and, after the administration of an anesthetic, he was put in a cot and left alone to die. To the utter surprise of the attending surgeon, the next morning found the mass of broken bones still breathing. His fever subsided; he survived a series of desperate operations, survived an apparently fatal hemorrhage, and continued to improve from day to day, till about the middle of June he recovered his complete consciousness, and was able to sit up and answer the questions of the medical men who, in ever increasing numbers, had visited his bedside for the last three weeks. As a newspaper correspondent sums up his case: “His strong constitution had[39]repulsed the assaults of death, till finally the grim monster went away to seek a less obstinate victim.” And, moreover, the exercise of athletic sports lessens the danger of such accidents: a trained gymnast will preserve his equilibrium where a weakling would break his neck.

According to the mythus of the Nature-worshiping Greeks, the darling of Venus was a hunter (not a tailor or a hair-dresser), and the gift of beauty is, indeed, bestowed on the lovers of health-giving sports, far oftener than on the votaries of fashion. Supreme beauty is country-bred; the daughters of peasants, of village squires, of fox-hunting barons, have again and again eclipsed the galaxies of court belles. Country boys have won hearts that seemed proof against the charm of city gallants. “I have seen many a handsome man in my time,” says old Mrs. Montague in Barry Cornwall’s “Table Talk,” “but never such a pair of eyes as young Robbie Burns kept flashing from under his beautiful brow.” “Women will condone many a moral blemish in a suitor,” says Arthur Schopenhauer; “they will pardon rudeness, egotism, and intellectual poverty; they will forgive even homeliness sooner than effeminacy. Instinct seems to tell them thatin the result of marriage a mother’s influence can neutralize any defect but that.”

[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The history of Antinaturalism is the history of a persistent war against the manlier instincts of the human race. Buddha and his Galilean disciples[40]considered the body the enemy of the soul. According to their system of ethics, Nature and all natural instincts are wholly evil; the renunciation of earth and all earthly hopes is their price of salvation, and the chief endeavor of their insane zeal is directed against the interests of the human body. The gospel of Buddha Sakiamuni, and its revamp, the “New Testament” of the Galilean messiah, abound with the ravings of ananti-physicalfanaticism as unknown to the ethics of the manly Hebrews as to the philosophy of the earth-loving Greeks and Romans. The duty of physical education and health-culture was entirely ignored in the gospel of the life-despising Nazarene. “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” was the ideal of the Grecian philosopher. A world-renouncing mind in a crushed body, was the ideal of the Christian moralists. The sculptors and painters of the Middle Ages vied in the representation of cadaverous saints, hollow-eyed devotees, and ghastly self-torturers. Physical training was tolerated as a secular evil indispensable for such purposes of the militant church as the hunting of heretics and the invasion of Mussulman empires; but its essential importance was vehemently disclaimed; the superior merit of sacrificing health to the interests of a body-despising soul was constantly commended, and the founders of the monastic orders that superseded the pagan schools of philosophy did not hesitate to enforce their dogmas by aggressive measures; the wretched convent slaves had to submit to weekly bleedings and strength-reducing penances; their novices were barbarously scourged for the clandestine indulgence of a lingering[41]love for health-giving sports—wrestling in the vacant halls of their cloister-prison, or racing conies on their way to their begging-grounds. The Olympic festivals were suppressed by order of a Christian emperor. The fathers of the church lost no opportunity to inveigh with rancorous invectives against the pagan culture of the manly powers, “so inimical to true contriteness of spirit and meek submission to the yoke of the gospel.” The followers of Origenes actually practicedcastrationas the most effectual means of taming the stubborn instincts of unregenerate boys. Their exemplar, who had recommended that plan for years, came at last to suspect the necessity of eradicating a germ of worldliness in his own mind, and proceeded to accomplish that purpose by emasculating himself. The anti-physical principle of European Buddhism manifests itself likewise in the fanaticism of the Scotch ascetics who raged against the scant physical recreations of a people already sufficiently afflicted by climatic vicissitudes and the parsimony of an indigent soil. It still survives in the bigotry of those modern zealots who groan at sight of a horse-race or wrestling-match, and would fain suppress the undue worldliness of ball-playing children. Manly pastimes were banished from the very dreams of a world to come; and while the heroes of Walhalla contest the prizes of martial sports, and the guests of Olympus share in the joyful festivals of the gods, the saints of our priest-blighted heaven need the alternative of an eternal hell to enjoy the prospect of an everlasting Sabbath-school.[42]Trials of strength and of skill,Rewarded by festive assemblies,Feasts in the halls of gods, where the voice of the musesAnswered in songs to the ravishing lyre of Apollo,quotes a German poet from the Vulgata, “when suddenly,” he adds, “a gaunt, blood-streaming Jew rushed in with a crown of thorns on his head and a huge wooden cross on his shoulder, which cross he dashed on the banquet table of the appalled gods, who turned paler and paler till they finally faded away into a pallid mist. And a dreary time then began; the world turned chill and bleak. The merry gods had departed; Olympus became aGolgotha, where sickly, skinned, and roasted deities sneaked about mournfully, nursing their wounds and chanting doleful hymns. Religion, once a worship of joy, became a whining worship of sorrow.”

C.—PERVERSION.

The history of Antinaturalism is the history of a persistent war against the manlier instincts of the human race. Buddha and his Galilean disciples[40]considered the body the enemy of the soul. According to their system of ethics, Nature and all natural instincts are wholly evil; the renunciation of earth and all earthly hopes is their price of salvation, and the chief endeavor of their insane zeal is directed against the interests of the human body. The gospel of Buddha Sakiamuni, and its revamp, the “New Testament” of the Galilean messiah, abound with the ravings of ananti-physicalfanaticism as unknown to the ethics of the manly Hebrews as to the philosophy of the earth-loving Greeks and Romans. The duty of physical education and health-culture was entirely ignored in the gospel of the life-despising Nazarene. “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” was the ideal of the Grecian philosopher. A world-renouncing mind in a crushed body, was the ideal of the Christian moralists. The sculptors and painters of the Middle Ages vied in the representation of cadaverous saints, hollow-eyed devotees, and ghastly self-torturers. Physical training was tolerated as a secular evil indispensable for such purposes of the militant church as the hunting of heretics and the invasion of Mussulman empires; but its essential importance was vehemently disclaimed; the superior merit of sacrificing health to the interests of a body-despising soul was constantly commended, and the founders of the monastic orders that superseded the pagan schools of philosophy did not hesitate to enforce their dogmas by aggressive measures; the wretched convent slaves had to submit to weekly bleedings and strength-reducing penances; their novices were barbarously scourged for the clandestine indulgence of a lingering[41]love for health-giving sports—wrestling in the vacant halls of their cloister-prison, or racing conies on their way to their begging-grounds. The Olympic festivals were suppressed by order of a Christian emperor. The fathers of the church lost no opportunity to inveigh with rancorous invectives against the pagan culture of the manly powers, “so inimical to true contriteness of spirit and meek submission to the yoke of the gospel.” The followers of Origenes actually practicedcastrationas the most effectual means of taming the stubborn instincts of unregenerate boys. Their exemplar, who had recommended that plan for years, came at last to suspect the necessity of eradicating a germ of worldliness in his own mind, and proceeded to accomplish that purpose by emasculating himself. The anti-physical principle of European Buddhism manifests itself likewise in the fanaticism of the Scotch ascetics who raged against the scant physical recreations of a people already sufficiently afflicted by climatic vicissitudes and the parsimony of an indigent soil. It still survives in the bigotry of those modern zealots who groan at sight of a horse-race or wrestling-match, and would fain suppress the undue worldliness of ball-playing children. Manly pastimes were banished from the very dreams of a world to come; and while the heroes of Walhalla contest the prizes of martial sports, and the guests of Olympus share in the joyful festivals of the gods, the saints of our priest-blighted heaven need the alternative of an eternal hell to enjoy the prospect of an everlasting Sabbath-school.[42]Trials of strength and of skill,Rewarded by festive assemblies,Feasts in the halls of gods, where the voice of the musesAnswered in songs to the ravishing lyre of Apollo,quotes a German poet from the Vulgata, “when suddenly,” he adds, “a gaunt, blood-streaming Jew rushed in with a crown of thorns on his head and a huge wooden cross on his shoulder, which cross he dashed on the banquet table of the appalled gods, who turned paler and paler till they finally faded away into a pallid mist. And a dreary time then began; the world turned chill and bleak. The merry gods had departed; Olympus became aGolgotha, where sickly, skinned, and roasted deities sneaked about mournfully, nursing their wounds and chanting doleful hymns. Religion, once a worship of joy, became a whining worship of sorrow.”

Trials of strength and of skill,Rewarded by festive assemblies,Feasts in the halls of gods, where the voice of the musesAnswered in songs to the ravishing lyre of Apollo,

Trials of strength and of skill,

Rewarded by festive assemblies,

Feasts in the halls of gods, where the voice of the muses

Answered in songs to the ravishing lyre of Apollo,

quotes a German poet from the Vulgata, “when suddenly,” he adds, “a gaunt, blood-streaming Jew rushed in with a crown of thorns on his head and a huge wooden cross on his shoulder, which cross he dashed on the banquet table of the appalled gods, who turned paler and paler till they finally faded away into a pallid mist. And a dreary time then began; the world turned chill and bleak. The merry gods had departed; Olympus became aGolgotha, where sickly, skinned, and roasted deities sneaked about mournfully, nursing their wounds and chanting doleful hymns. Religion, once a worship of joy, became a whining worship of sorrow.”

[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.But Nature had her revenge, and the despisers of their own bodies became so truly contemptible that in comparison the rudest barbarians of antiquity seemed respectable men. The neglect of physical exercise avenged itself in loathsome diseases, the perverted instincts exploded in vices; the monkish self-abasers became caricatures of manhood: bloated, whining, mean, and viciously sensual wretches, the laughing-stock of foreign nations and the curse and disgrace of their own. Physically, mentally, and morally, the earth-despising convent drone represented the vilest type of degeneration to which the manhood of our race has ever been degraded, and the[43]enforced veneration of such monsters, as exemplars of perfection, has perverted the ethical standards of mankind to a degree for which our present generation is as yet far from having wholly recovered. The love of athletic recreations is still smirched with the stigma of the Middle Ages; “respectability” is too often mistaken for a synonym of pedantry and conventional effeminacy; parents still frown upon the health-giving sports of their children; vice still sneaks in the disguise of saintliness and world-renouncing aversion to physical recreations.The degeneration of many once manful races has reached an incurable phase: the listless resignation to physical abasement and decrepitude. Earth has spurned her despisers; millions of priest-slaves in southern Europe have lost the inheritance of their fathers, and have to till the soil for aliens and despots. The arbitrament of war has made them taste the lowest dregs of national humiliation; the life-long worshipers of whining saints appealed in vain to the God of Battles, and were forced to eat dust at the feet of the despised Infidel and heretic. The ships of the Spanish Armada were consecrated by a chorus of ranting priests commending them to the miraculous protection of heaven; and heaven’s answer came in the blast of the hurricane that buried their fleet in the depths of the sea. The same nation once more invoked the aid of the saints for the protection of an armament against the great naval powers of the nineteenth century. The ships were ceremoniously baptized with the most fulsomely pious names: “The Holy Savior of the World,” “Saint Maria,” “Saint[44]Joseph,” “The Most Holy Trinity,” and sent forth in full reliance on the protection of supernatural agencies. But in the encounter with Nelson’s self-relying veterans the sacred bubble at once collapsed. St. Joseph’s impotence howled in vain for the assistance of the Holy Ghost. The Savior of the World could save himself only by a shameful flight, and the Most Holy Trinity succumbed to a decided surplus of holes.

D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

But Nature had her revenge, and the despisers of their own bodies became so truly contemptible that in comparison the rudest barbarians of antiquity seemed respectable men. The neglect of physical exercise avenged itself in loathsome diseases, the perverted instincts exploded in vices; the monkish self-abasers became caricatures of manhood: bloated, whining, mean, and viciously sensual wretches, the laughing-stock of foreign nations and the curse and disgrace of their own. Physically, mentally, and morally, the earth-despising convent drone represented the vilest type of degeneration to which the manhood of our race has ever been degraded, and the[43]enforced veneration of such monsters, as exemplars of perfection, has perverted the ethical standards of mankind to a degree for which our present generation is as yet far from having wholly recovered. The love of athletic recreations is still smirched with the stigma of the Middle Ages; “respectability” is too often mistaken for a synonym of pedantry and conventional effeminacy; parents still frown upon the health-giving sports of their children; vice still sneaks in the disguise of saintliness and world-renouncing aversion to physical recreations.The degeneration of many once manful races has reached an incurable phase: the listless resignation to physical abasement and decrepitude. Earth has spurned her despisers; millions of priest-slaves in southern Europe have lost the inheritance of their fathers, and have to till the soil for aliens and despots. The arbitrament of war has made them taste the lowest dregs of national humiliation; the life-long worshipers of whining saints appealed in vain to the God of Battles, and were forced to eat dust at the feet of the despised Infidel and heretic. The ships of the Spanish Armada were consecrated by a chorus of ranting priests commending them to the miraculous protection of heaven; and heaven’s answer came in the blast of the hurricane that buried their fleet in the depths of the sea. The same nation once more invoked the aid of the saints for the protection of an armament against the great naval powers of the nineteenth century. The ships were ceremoniously baptized with the most fulsomely pious names: “The Holy Savior of the World,” “Saint Maria,” “Saint[44]Joseph,” “The Most Holy Trinity,” and sent forth in full reliance on the protection of supernatural agencies. But in the encounter with Nelson’s self-relying veterans the sacred bubble at once collapsed. St. Joseph’s impotence howled in vain for the assistance of the Holy Ghost. The Savior of the World could save himself only by a shameful flight, and the Most Holy Trinity succumbed to a decided surplus of holes.

The degeneration of many once manful races has reached an incurable phase: the listless resignation to physical abasement and decrepitude. Earth has spurned her despisers; millions of priest-slaves in southern Europe have lost the inheritance of their fathers, and have to till the soil for aliens and despots. The arbitrament of war has made them taste the lowest dregs of national humiliation; the life-long worshipers of whining saints appealed in vain to the God of Battles, and were forced to eat dust at the feet of the despised Infidel and heretic. The ships of the Spanish Armada were consecrated by a chorus of ranting priests commending them to the miraculous protection of heaven; and heaven’s answer came in the blast of the hurricane that buried their fleet in the depths of the sea. The same nation once more invoked the aid of the saints for the protection of an armament against the great naval powers of the nineteenth century. The ships were ceremoniously baptized with the most fulsomely pious names: “The Holy Savior of the World,” “Saint Maria,” “Saint[44]Joseph,” “The Most Holy Trinity,” and sent forth in full reliance on the protection of supernatural agencies. But in the encounter with Nelson’s self-relying veterans the sacred bubble at once collapsed. St. Joseph’s impotence howled in vain for the assistance of the Holy Ghost. The Savior of the World could save himself only by a shameful flight, and the Most Holy Trinity succumbed to a decided surplus of holes.

[Contents]E.—REDEMPTION.In the work of physical regeneration Nature meets the reformer more than half-way. Our children need but little encouragement to break the fetters of the fatuous restraint that dooms them to a life of physical apathy. They ask nothing but time and opportunity to redeem the coming generation from the stigma of unmanliness and debility. Physical and intellectual education should again go hand in hand if we would promote the happiness of a redeemed race on the plan that made the age of Grecian philosophy and gymnastics the brightest era in the history of mankind. Physical reform should be promoted by the systematic encouragement of athletic sports; every township should have a free gymnasium, every village a free foot-race park; by prize-offers for supremacy in competitive gymnastics wealthy philanthropists could turn thousands of boy topers into young athletes. We should have athletic county meetings, state field-days, and national or international Olympiads.Educational ethics should fully recognize the[45]rights of the body. We should admit the unorthodox, but also undeniable, truth that an upright and magnanimous disposition is a concomitant of bodily strength, while fickleness, duplicity, and querulous injustice are the characteristics of debility. We should teach our children that a healthy mind can dwell only in a healthy body, and that he who pretends to find no time to take care of his health is a workman who thinks it a waste of time to take care of his tools.

E.—REDEMPTION.

In the work of physical regeneration Nature meets the reformer more than half-way. Our children need but little encouragement to break the fetters of the fatuous restraint that dooms them to a life of physical apathy. They ask nothing but time and opportunity to redeem the coming generation from the stigma of unmanliness and debility. Physical and intellectual education should again go hand in hand if we would promote the happiness of a redeemed race on the plan that made the age of Grecian philosophy and gymnastics the brightest era in the history of mankind. Physical reform should be promoted by the systematic encouragement of athletic sports; every township should have a free gymnasium, every village a free foot-race park; by prize-offers for supremacy in competitive gymnastics wealthy philanthropists could turn thousands of boy topers into young athletes. We should have athletic county meetings, state field-days, and national or international Olympiads.Educational ethics should fully recognize the[45]rights of the body. We should admit the unorthodox, but also undeniable, truth that an upright and magnanimous disposition is a concomitant of bodily strength, while fickleness, duplicity, and querulous injustice are the characteristics of debility. We should teach our children that a healthy mind can dwell only in a healthy body, and that he who pretends to find no time to take care of his health is a workman who thinks it a waste of time to take care of his tools.

Educational ethics should fully recognize the[45]rights of the body. We should admit the unorthodox, but also undeniable, truth that an upright and magnanimous disposition is a concomitant of bodily strength, while fickleness, duplicity, and querulous injustice are the characteristics of debility. We should teach our children that a healthy mind can dwell only in a healthy body, and that he who pretends to find no time to take care of his health is a workman who thinks it a waste of time to take care of his tools.

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