I.—PHYSICAL MAXIMS.

I.—PHYSICAL MAXIMS.[Contents]CHAPTER I.HEALTH.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.Nature has guarded the health of her creatures by a marvelous system of protective intuitions. The sensitive membrane of the eye resents the intrusion of every foreign substance. An intuitive sense of discomfort announces every injurious extreme of temperature. To the unperverted taste of animals in a state of nature wholesome food is pleasant, injurious substances repulsive or insipid. Captain Kane found that only the rage of famine will tempt the foxes of the Arctic coastlands to touch spoiled meat. In times of scarcity the baboons of the Abyssinian mountains greedily hunt for edible roots, which an unerring faculty enables them to distinguish from the poisonous varieties. The naturalist Tschudi mentions a troop of half-tamed chamois forcing their way through a shingle roof, rather than pass a night in the stifling atmosphere of a goat stable.Man in his primitive state had his full share of those protective instincts, which still manifest themselves in children and Nature-guided savages. It is a mistake to suppose that the lowest of those savages[19]are naturally fond of ardent spirits. The travelers Park, Gerstaecker, Vambery, Kohl, De Tocqueville, and Brehm agree that the first step on the road to ruin is always taken in deference to the example of the admired superior race, if not in compliance with direct persuasion. The negroes of the Senegal highlands shuddered at the first taste of alcohol, but from a wish to conciliate the good will of their visitors hesitated to decline their invitations, which subsequently, indeed, became rather superfluous. The children of the wilderness unhesitatingly prefer the hardships of a winter camp to the atmospheric poisons of our tenement houses. Shamyl Ben Haddin, the Circassian war chief, whose iron constitution had endured the vicissitudes of thirty-four campaigns, pathetically protested against the pest air of his Russian prison cell, and warned his jailers that, unless his dormitory was changed, Heaven would hold them responsible for the guilt of his suicide. I have known country boys to step out into a shower of rain and sleet to escape from the contaminated atmosphere of a city workshop, and after a week’s work in a spinning mill return to the penury of their mountain homes, rather than purchase dainties at the expense of their lungs.The wordfrugality, in its original sense, referred literally to a diet of tree fruits, in distinction to carnivorous fare, and nine out of ten children still decidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to the richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-made clothes to the constraint of fashionable fripperies. The main tenets of our dress-reformers are[20]anticipated in the sensible garments of many half-civilized nations. Boys, within reach of a free bathing river, can dispense with the advice of the hydropathic school. They delight in exercise; they laugh at the imaginary danger of fresh-air draughts, and the perils of barefoot rambles in wet and dry. They would cast their vote in favor of the outdoor pursuit of hundreds of occupations which custom, rather than necessity, now associates with the disadvantages of indoor confinement. The hygienic influence of arboreal vegetation has been recognized by the ablest pathologists of modern times; avenues of shade trees have been found to redeem the sanitary condition of many a grimy city, and the eminent hygienist, Schrodt, holds that, as a remedial institution, a shady park is worth a dozen drug stores. But all these lessons only confirm an often manifested, and too often suppressed, instinct of our young children: their passionate love of woodland sports, their love of tree shade, of greenwood camps, of forest life in all its forms. Those who hold that “nature” is but a synonym of “habit” should witness the rapture of city children at first sight of forest glades and shady meadow brooks, and compare it with the city dread of the Swiss peasant lad or the American backwoods boy, sickened by the fumes and the uproar of a large manufacturing town. A thousands years of vice and abnormal habits have not yet silenced the voice of the physical conscience that recalls our steps to the path of Nature, and will not permit us to transgress her laws unwarned.[21][Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The reward of nature-abiding habits is not confined to the negative advantage of escaping the discomforts of disease. In the pursuit of countless competitive avocations the Art of Survival is a chief secret of success, but in this age of sanitary abuses our lives are mostly half-told tales. Our season ends before the trees of hope have time to ripen their fruit; before their day’s work is done our toilers are overtaken by the shadows of approaching night. Sanitary reforms would undoubtedly lengthen our average term of life, and an increase of longevity alone would solve the most vexing riddles of existence: the apparent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit and compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive promises and baffled hopes of life. For millions of our fellow-men an increase of health and longevity would suffice to make life decidedly worth living. Health lessens the temptations to many vices. Perfect health blesses its possessor with a spontaneous cheerfulness almost proof against the frowns of fortune and the cares of poverty. With a meal of barley cakes and milk, a straw couch, and scant clothing of homespun linen, a shepherd-boy in the highlands of the Austrian Alps may enjoy existence to a degree that exuberates in frolic and jubilant shouts, while all the resources of wealth cannot recall the sunshine which sickness has banished from the life of the dyspeptic glutton. If happiness could be computed by measure and weight, it would be found that her richest treasures are not stored in gilded walls, but[22]in the homes of frugal thrift, of rustic vigor and nature-loving independence. The sweetness of health reflects itself in grace of form and deportment, and wins friends where the elegance of studied manners gains only admirers. Health is also a primary condition of that clearness of mind the absence of which can be only partially compensated by the light of learning. Health is the basis of mental as of bodily vigor; country-bred boys have again and again carried off the prizes of academical honors from the pupils of refined cities, and the foremost reformers of all ages and countries have been men of the people; low-born, but not the less well-born, sons of hardy rustics and mechanics, from Moses, Socrates, Epictetus, Jesus Ben Josef, and Mohammed, to Luther, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.Habitual sin against the health-laws of Nature was originally chiefly a consequence of untoward circumstances. Slaves, paupers, immigrants to the inhospitable climes of the higher latitudes, were forced to adopt abnormal modes of life which, in the course of time, hardened into habits. Man, like all the varieties of his four-handed relatives, is a native of the tropics, and the diet of our earliest manlike ancestors was, in all probability,frugal: tree-fruits, berries, nuts, roots, and edible herbs and gums. But the first colonists of the winter lands were obliged to eke out an existence by eating the flesh of their fellow-creatures, and a carnivorous diet thus became the[23]habitual and, in many countries, almost the exclusive diet of the nomadic inhabitants.Alcohol is a product of fermentation, and the avarice of a cruel master may have forced his slaves to quench their thirst with fermented must or hydromel till habit begot a baneful second nature, and the at first reluctant victims of intoxication learned to preferspoiledto fresh grape-juice. Sedentary occupations, however distasteful at first, are apt to engender a sluggish aversion to physical exercise, and even habitual confinement in a vitiated atmosphere may at last become a second nature, characterized by a morbid dread of fresh air. The slaves of the Roman landowners had to pass their nights in prison-like dungeons, and may have contracted the first germ of that mental disease known as the night-air superstition, the idea, namely, that after dark the vitiated atmosphere of a stifling dormitory is preferable to the balm of the cooling night wind.In modern times an unprecedented concurrence of circumstances has stimulated a feverish haste in the pursuit of wealth, and thus indirectly led to the neglect of personal hygiene. The abolition of the public festivals by which the potentates of the pagan empires compensated their subjects for the loss of political freedom, the heartless egotism of our wealthy Pharisees, venal justice, and the dire bondage of city life all help to stimulate a headlong race toward the goal of the promised land of ease and independence—a goal reached only by a favored few compared with the multitudes who daily drop down wayworn and exhausted.[24]But the deadliest blow to the cause of health was struck by the anti-natural fanaticism of the Middle Ages, the world-hating infatuation of the maniacs who depreciated every secular blessing as a curse in disguise, and despised their own bodies as they despised nature, life, and earth. The disciples of the world-renouncing messiah actually welcomed disease as a sign of divine favor, they gloried in decrepitude and deformity, and promoted the work of degeneration with a persevering zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the human race. For a period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic history of Europe is the history of a systematic war against the interests of the human body; the “mortification of the flesh” was enjoined as a cardinal duty of a true believer; health-giving recreations were suppressed, while health-destroying vices were encouraged by the example of the clergy; domestic hygiene was utterly neglected, and the founders of some twenty-four different monastic orders vied in the invention of new penances and systematic outrages upon the health of the poor convent-slaves. Their diet was confined to the coarsest and often most loathsome food; they were subjected to weekly bleedings, to profitless hardships and deprivations; their sleep was broken night after night; fasting was carried to a length which often avenged itself in permanent insanity; and their only compensation for a daily repetition of health-destroying afflictions was the permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spirituous poisons: the same bigots who grudged their followers a night of unbroken rest or a mouthful of[25]digestible food indulged them in quantities of alcoholic beverages that would have staggered the conscience of a modern beer-swiller.The bodily health of a community was held so utterly below the attention of a Christian magistrate that every large city became a hotbed of contagious diseases; small-pox and scrofula became pandemic disorders; the pestilence of the Black Death ravaged Europe from end to end—nay, instead of trying to remove the cause of the evil, the wretched victims were advised to seek relief in prayer and self-torture, and a philosopher uttering a word of protest against such illusions would have risked to have his tongue torn out by the roots and his body consigned to the flames of the stake.Mankind has never wholly recovered from that reign of insanity. Indifference to many of the plainest health-laws of nature is still the reproach of our so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no time to expurgate the slums of their own cities; our missionary societies spend millions to acquaint the natives of distant islands with the ceremony of baptism, but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment of free public baths for the benefit of their poor neighbors, whose children are scourged or caged like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of the next river. Temperance, indeed, is preached in the name of the miracle-monger who turned water into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to drown their misery in the Lethe of intoxication are[26]deprived of every healthier pastime; the magistrates of our wealthy cities rage with penal ordinances against the abettors of public amusements on the day when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leisure for recreation. Poor factory children who would spend the holidays in the paradise of the green hills are lured into the baited trap of a Sabbath-school and bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew ghost-stories or the records of fictitious genealogies; but the offer to enlarge the educational sphere of our public schools by the introduction of a health primer would be scornfully rejected as an attempt to divert the attention of the pupils from more important topics.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.But the laws of Nature cannot be outraged with impunity, and the aid of supernatural agencies has never yet protected our ghost-mongers from the consequences of their sins against the monitions of their physical conscience. The neglect of cleanliness avenges itself in diseases which no prayer can avert; during the most filthful and prayerful period of the Middle Ages, seven out of ten city-dwellers were subject to scrofula of that especially malignant form that attacks the glands and the arteries as well as the skin. Medical nostrums and clerical hocus-pocus of the ordinary sort were, indeed, so notoriously unavailing against that virulent affection that thousands of sufferers took long journeys to try the efficacy of aking’stouch, as recorded by the unanimous testimony of contemporary writers, as well as in the still[27]current term of asovereignremedy. A long foot-journey, with its opportunities for physical exercise, outdoor camps, and changes of diet, often really effected the desired result; but, on their return to their reeking hovels, the convalescents experienced a speedy relapse, and had either to repeat the wearisome journey or resign themselves to the “mysterious dispensation” of a Providence which obstinately refused to let miracles interfere with the normal operation of the physiological laws recorded in the protests of instinct. Stench, nausea, and sick-headaches might, indeed, have enforced those protests upon the attention of the sufferers; but the disciples of Antinaturalism had been taught to mistrust the promptings of their natural desires, and to accept discomforts as signs of divine favor, or, in extreme cases, to trust their abatement to the intercession of the saints, rather than to the profane interference of secular science.The dungeon-life of the monastic maniacs, and the abject submission to the nuisance of atmospheric impurities, avenged themselves in the ravages of pulmonary consumption; the votaries of dungeon-smells were taught the value of fresh air by the tortures of an affliction from which only the removal of the cause could deliver a victim, and millions of orthodox citizens died scores of years before the attainment of a life-term which a seemingly inscrutable dispensation of Heaven grants to the unbelieving savages of the wilderness. The cheapest of all remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable abundance, craving admission and offering them the[28]aid which Nature grants even to the lowliest of her creatures, but a son of a miracle-working church had no concern with such things, and was enjoined to rely on the efficacy of mystic ceremonies: “If any man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” “And the prayer of faith shall cure the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”Thousands of the fatuous bigots who prayed for “meekness of spirit” continued to gorge themselves with the food of carnivorous animals, and thus inflamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorseless propensities of those brutes. Luigi Cornaro, the Italian reformer, assures us that it was no uncommon thing for a nobleman or prelate of his century to swallow fourteen pounds of strong meats at a single meal, and that, after invoking the blessing of Heaven upon such a repast, the devourer of meat-pies would rise with his paunch distended “like the hide of a drowned dog.” The “Love of Enemies,” “forgiveness and meekness,” were on their lips; but those fourteen pounds of meat-pie worked out their normal result; and among the carnivorous saints of that age we accordingly find men whose fiendish inhumanity would have appalled the roughest legionary of pagan Rome. Cæsar Borgia, the son of a highest ecclesiastic dignitary, a disciple of a priestly training-school, and himself a prince of the church, seems to have combined the stealthy cunning of a viper with the bloodthirst of a hyena. Four times he made and broke the most solemn treaties,[29]in order to get an opportunity to invade the territory of an unprepared neighbor. His campaigns were conducted with a truculence denounced even by his own allies; with his own hand he poisoned fourteen of his boon companions, in order to possess himself of their property; twenty-three of his political and clerical rivals were removed by the dagger of hired assassins or executed upon the testimony of suborned perjurers. He tried to poison his brother-in-law, Prince Alphonso of Aragon, in order to facilitate his design of seducing his own sister; he made repeated, and at last partly successful, attempts to poison the brother of his mother and his own father, the pope.The heartless neglect of sanitary provisions for the comfort of the poor avenges itself in epidemics that visit the abodes of wealth as well as the hovels of misery. A stall-fed preacher of our southern seaport towns may circulate a petition for the suppression of Sunday excursions, in order to prevent the recreation-needing toilers of his community from leaving town on St. Collection Day; he may advocate the arrest of bathing schoolboys, in order to suppress an undue love of physical enjoyments, or to gratify a female tithe-payer who seeks an opportunity of displaying her prudish virtue at the expense of the helpless; he may vote to suppress outdoor sports in the cool of the late evening, when the inhabitants of the tenement streets are trying to enjoy an hour of extra Sabbatarian recreation—a privilege to be reserved for the saints who can rest six days out of seven, and on the seventh harvest the fruits of other men’s labor. But epidemics refuse to recognize such distinctions,[30]and the vomit of yellow fever will force the most reverend monopolist to disgorge the proceeds of the tithes coined from the misery of consumptive factory children. Nor can wealth purchase immunity from the natural consequences of habitual vice. The dyspeptic glutton is a Tantalus who starves in the midst of abundance. The worn-out tradesman, whose restless toil in the mines of mammon has led to asthma or consumption, would vainly offer to barter half his gold for half a year of health. Thousands of families who deny themselves every recreation, who linger out the summer in the sweltering city, and toil and save “for the sake of our dear children,” have received Nature’s verdict on the wisdom of their course in the premature death of those children.[Contents]E.—REDEMPTION.It has often been said that the physical regeneration of the human race could be achieved without the aid of a miracle, if its systematic pursuit were followed with half the zeal which our stock-breeders bestow upon the rearing of their cows and horses. A general observance of the most clearly recognized laws of health would, indeed, abundantly suffice for that purpose. There is, for instance, no doubt that the morbid tendency of our indoor modes of occupation could be counteracted by gymnastics, and the trustees of our education fund should build a gymnasium near every town school. As a condition of health, pure air is as essential as pure water and food, and no house-owner should be permitted to sow[31]the seeds of deadly diseases by crowding his tenants into the back rooms of unaired and unairable slum-prisons. New cities should be projected on the plan of concentric rings of cottage suburbs (interspersed with parks and gardens), instead of successive strata of tenement flats.In every large town all friends of humanity should unite for the enforcement of Sunday freedom, and spare no pains to brand the Sabbath bigots as enemies of the human race. We should found Sunday gardens, where our toil-worn fellow-citizens could enjoy their holidays with outdoor sports and outdoor dances, free museums, temperance drinks, healthy refreshments, collections of botanical and zoölogical curiosities. Country excursions on the only leisure day of the laboring classes should be as free as air and sunshine, and every civilized community should have a Recreation League for the promotion of thatpurpose.In the second century of our chronological era the cities of the Roman empire vied in the establishment of free public baths. Antioch alone had fourteen of them; Alexandria not less than twelve, and Rome itself at least twenty, some of them of such magnificence and extent that their foundations have withstood the ravages of sixteen centuries. Many of those establishments were entirely free, and even theThermæ, or luxurious Warm Baths, of Caracalla admitted visitors for a gate-fee which all but the poorest could afford. Our boasted civilization will have to follow such examples before it can begin to deserve its name; and even the free circus games[32](by no means confined to the combats of armed prize-fighters) were preferable to the fanatical suppression of all popular sports which made the age of Puritanism the dreariest period of that dismal era known as the Reign of the Cross.The preservation of health is at least not less important than the preservation of Hebrew mythology; and communities who force their children to sacrifice a large portion of their time to the study of Asiatic miracle legends might well permit them to devote an occasional hour or two to the study of modern physiology. We should have health primers and teachers of hygiene, and the most primitive district school should find time for a few weekly lessons in the rudiments of sanitary science, such as the importance of ventilation, the best modes of exercise, the proper quality and quantity of our daily food, the significance of the stimulant habit, the use and abuse of dress, etc.Such text-books would prepare the way for health lectures, for health legislation and the reform of municipal hygiene. The untruth that “a man can not be defiled by things entering him from without” has been thoroughly exploded by the lessons of science, and should no longer excuse the neglect of thatfrugalitywhich in the times of the pagan republics formed the best safeguard of national vigor. Milk, bread, and fruit, instead of greasy viands, alcohol, and narcotic drinks, would soon modify the mortality statistics of our large cities, and we should not hesitate to recognize the truth that the remarkable[33]longevity of the Jews and Mohammedans has a great deal to do with their dread of impure food.

I.—PHYSICAL MAXIMS.[Contents]CHAPTER I.HEALTH.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.Nature has guarded the health of her creatures by a marvelous system of protective intuitions. The sensitive membrane of the eye resents the intrusion of every foreign substance. An intuitive sense of discomfort announces every injurious extreme of temperature. To the unperverted taste of animals in a state of nature wholesome food is pleasant, injurious substances repulsive or insipid. Captain Kane found that only the rage of famine will tempt the foxes of the Arctic coastlands to touch spoiled meat. In times of scarcity the baboons of the Abyssinian mountains greedily hunt for edible roots, which an unerring faculty enables them to distinguish from the poisonous varieties. The naturalist Tschudi mentions a troop of half-tamed chamois forcing their way through a shingle roof, rather than pass a night in the stifling atmosphere of a goat stable.Man in his primitive state had his full share of those protective instincts, which still manifest themselves in children and Nature-guided savages. It is a mistake to suppose that the lowest of those savages[19]are naturally fond of ardent spirits. The travelers Park, Gerstaecker, Vambery, Kohl, De Tocqueville, and Brehm agree that the first step on the road to ruin is always taken in deference to the example of the admired superior race, if not in compliance with direct persuasion. The negroes of the Senegal highlands shuddered at the first taste of alcohol, but from a wish to conciliate the good will of their visitors hesitated to decline their invitations, which subsequently, indeed, became rather superfluous. The children of the wilderness unhesitatingly prefer the hardships of a winter camp to the atmospheric poisons of our tenement houses. Shamyl Ben Haddin, the Circassian war chief, whose iron constitution had endured the vicissitudes of thirty-four campaigns, pathetically protested against the pest air of his Russian prison cell, and warned his jailers that, unless his dormitory was changed, Heaven would hold them responsible for the guilt of his suicide. I have known country boys to step out into a shower of rain and sleet to escape from the contaminated atmosphere of a city workshop, and after a week’s work in a spinning mill return to the penury of their mountain homes, rather than purchase dainties at the expense of their lungs.The wordfrugality, in its original sense, referred literally to a diet of tree fruits, in distinction to carnivorous fare, and nine out of ten children still decidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to the richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-made clothes to the constraint of fashionable fripperies. The main tenets of our dress-reformers are[20]anticipated in the sensible garments of many half-civilized nations. Boys, within reach of a free bathing river, can dispense with the advice of the hydropathic school. They delight in exercise; they laugh at the imaginary danger of fresh-air draughts, and the perils of barefoot rambles in wet and dry. They would cast their vote in favor of the outdoor pursuit of hundreds of occupations which custom, rather than necessity, now associates with the disadvantages of indoor confinement. The hygienic influence of arboreal vegetation has been recognized by the ablest pathologists of modern times; avenues of shade trees have been found to redeem the sanitary condition of many a grimy city, and the eminent hygienist, Schrodt, holds that, as a remedial institution, a shady park is worth a dozen drug stores. But all these lessons only confirm an often manifested, and too often suppressed, instinct of our young children: their passionate love of woodland sports, their love of tree shade, of greenwood camps, of forest life in all its forms. Those who hold that “nature” is but a synonym of “habit” should witness the rapture of city children at first sight of forest glades and shady meadow brooks, and compare it with the city dread of the Swiss peasant lad or the American backwoods boy, sickened by the fumes and the uproar of a large manufacturing town. A thousands years of vice and abnormal habits have not yet silenced the voice of the physical conscience that recalls our steps to the path of Nature, and will not permit us to transgress her laws unwarned.[21][Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The reward of nature-abiding habits is not confined to the negative advantage of escaping the discomforts of disease. In the pursuit of countless competitive avocations the Art of Survival is a chief secret of success, but in this age of sanitary abuses our lives are mostly half-told tales. Our season ends before the trees of hope have time to ripen their fruit; before their day’s work is done our toilers are overtaken by the shadows of approaching night. Sanitary reforms would undoubtedly lengthen our average term of life, and an increase of longevity alone would solve the most vexing riddles of existence: the apparent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit and compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive promises and baffled hopes of life. For millions of our fellow-men an increase of health and longevity would suffice to make life decidedly worth living. Health lessens the temptations to many vices. Perfect health blesses its possessor with a spontaneous cheerfulness almost proof against the frowns of fortune and the cares of poverty. With a meal of barley cakes and milk, a straw couch, and scant clothing of homespun linen, a shepherd-boy in the highlands of the Austrian Alps may enjoy existence to a degree that exuberates in frolic and jubilant shouts, while all the resources of wealth cannot recall the sunshine which sickness has banished from the life of the dyspeptic glutton. If happiness could be computed by measure and weight, it would be found that her richest treasures are not stored in gilded walls, but[22]in the homes of frugal thrift, of rustic vigor and nature-loving independence. The sweetness of health reflects itself in grace of form and deportment, and wins friends where the elegance of studied manners gains only admirers. Health is also a primary condition of that clearness of mind the absence of which can be only partially compensated by the light of learning. Health is the basis of mental as of bodily vigor; country-bred boys have again and again carried off the prizes of academical honors from the pupils of refined cities, and the foremost reformers of all ages and countries have been men of the people; low-born, but not the less well-born, sons of hardy rustics and mechanics, from Moses, Socrates, Epictetus, Jesus Ben Josef, and Mohammed, to Luther, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.Habitual sin against the health-laws of Nature was originally chiefly a consequence of untoward circumstances. Slaves, paupers, immigrants to the inhospitable climes of the higher latitudes, were forced to adopt abnormal modes of life which, in the course of time, hardened into habits. Man, like all the varieties of his four-handed relatives, is a native of the tropics, and the diet of our earliest manlike ancestors was, in all probability,frugal: tree-fruits, berries, nuts, roots, and edible herbs and gums. But the first colonists of the winter lands were obliged to eke out an existence by eating the flesh of their fellow-creatures, and a carnivorous diet thus became the[23]habitual and, in many countries, almost the exclusive diet of the nomadic inhabitants.Alcohol is a product of fermentation, and the avarice of a cruel master may have forced his slaves to quench their thirst with fermented must or hydromel till habit begot a baneful second nature, and the at first reluctant victims of intoxication learned to preferspoiledto fresh grape-juice. Sedentary occupations, however distasteful at first, are apt to engender a sluggish aversion to physical exercise, and even habitual confinement in a vitiated atmosphere may at last become a second nature, characterized by a morbid dread of fresh air. The slaves of the Roman landowners had to pass their nights in prison-like dungeons, and may have contracted the first germ of that mental disease known as the night-air superstition, the idea, namely, that after dark the vitiated atmosphere of a stifling dormitory is preferable to the balm of the cooling night wind.In modern times an unprecedented concurrence of circumstances has stimulated a feverish haste in the pursuit of wealth, and thus indirectly led to the neglect of personal hygiene. The abolition of the public festivals by which the potentates of the pagan empires compensated their subjects for the loss of political freedom, the heartless egotism of our wealthy Pharisees, venal justice, and the dire bondage of city life all help to stimulate a headlong race toward the goal of the promised land of ease and independence—a goal reached only by a favored few compared with the multitudes who daily drop down wayworn and exhausted.[24]But the deadliest blow to the cause of health was struck by the anti-natural fanaticism of the Middle Ages, the world-hating infatuation of the maniacs who depreciated every secular blessing as a curse in disguise, and despised their own bodies as they despised nature, life, and earth. The disciples of the world-renouncing messiah actually welcomed disease as a sign of divine favor, they gloried in decrepitude and deformity, and promoted the work of degeneration with a persevering zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the human race. For a period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic history of Europe is the history of a systematic war against the interests of the human body; the “mortification of the flesh” was enjoined as a cardinal duty of a true believer; health-giving recreations were suppressed, while health-destroying vices were encouraged by the example of the clergy; domestic hygiene was utterly neglected, and the founders of some twenty-four different monastic orders vied in the invention of new penances and systematic outrages upon the health of the poor convent-slaves. Their diet was confined to the coarsest and often most loathsome food; they were subjected to weekly bleedings, to profitless hardships and deprivations; their sleep was broken night after night; fasting was carried to a length which often avenged itself in permanent insanity; and their only compensation for a daily repetition of health-destroying afflictions was the permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spirituous poisons: the same bigots who grudged their followers a night of unbroken rest or a mouthful of[25]digestible food indulged them in quantities of alcoholic beverages that would have staggered the conscience of a modern beer-swiller.The bodily health of a community was held so utterly below the attention of a Christian magistrate that every large city became a hotbed of contagious diseases; small-pox and scrofula became pandemic disorders; the pestilence of the Black Death ravaged Europe from end to end—nay, instead of trying to remove the cause of the evil, the wretched victims were advised to seek relief in prayer and self-torture, and a philosopher uttering a word of protest against such illusions would have risked to have his tongue torn out by the roots and his body consigned to the flames of the stake.Mankind has never wholly recovered from that reign of insanity. Indifference to many of the plainest health-laws of nature is still the reproach of our so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no time to expurgate the slums of their own cities; our missionary societies spend millions to acquaint the natives of distant islands with the ceremony of baptism, but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment of free public baths for the benefit of their poor neighbors, whose children are scourged or caged like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of the next river. Temperance, indeed, is preached in the name of the miracle-monger who turned water into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to drown their misery in the Lethe of intoxication are[26]deprived of every healthier pastime; the magistrates of our wealthy cities rage with penal ordinances against the abettors of public amusements on the day when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leisure for recreation. Poor factory children who would spend the holidays in the paradise of the green hills are lured into the baited trap of a Sabbath-school and bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew ghost-stories or the records of fictitious genealogies; but the offer to enlarge the educational sphere of our public schools by the introduction of a health primer would be scornfully rejected as an attempt to divert the attention of the pupils from more important topics.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.But the laws of Nature cannot be outraged with impunity, and the aid of supernatural agencies has never yet protected our ghost-mongers from the consequences of their sins against the monitions of their physical conscience. The neglect of cleanliness avenges itself in diseases which no prayer can avert; during the most filthful and prayerful period of the Middle Ages, seven out of ten city-dwellers were subject to scrofula of that especially malignant form that attacks the glands and the arteries as well as the skin. Medical nostrums and clerical hocus-pocus of the ordinary sort were, indeed, so notoriously unavailing against that virulent affection that thousands of sufferers took long journeys to try the efficacy of aking’stouch, as recorded by the unanimous testimony of contemporary writers, as well as in the still[27]current term of asovereignremedy. A long foot-journey, with its opportunities for physical exercise, outdoor camps, and changes of diet, often really effected the desired result; but, on their return to their reeking hovels, the convalescents experienced a speedy relapse, and had either to repeat the wearisome journey or resign themselves to the “mysterious dispensation” of a Providence which obstinately refused to let miracles interfere with the normal operation of the physiological laws recorded in the protests of instinct. Stench, nausea, and sick-headaches might, indeed, have enforced those protests upon the attention of the sufferers; but the disciples of Antinaturalism had been taught to mistrust the promptings of their natural desires, and to accept discomforts as signs of divine favor, or, in extreme cases, to trust their abatement to the intercession of the saints, rather than to the profane interference of secular science.The dungeon-life of the monastic maniacs, and the abject submission to the nuisance of atmospheric impurities, avenged themselves in the ravages of pulmonary consumption; the votaries of dungeon-smells were taught the value of fresh air by the tortures of an affliction from which only the removal of the cause could deliver a victim, and millions of orthodox citizens died scores of years before the attainment of a life-term which a seemingly inscrutable dispensation of Heaven grants to the unbelieving savages of the wilderness. The cheapest of all remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable abundance, craving admission and offering them the[28]aid which Nature grants even to the lowliest of her creatures, but a son of a miracle-working church had no concern with such things, and was enjoined to rely on the efficacy of mystic ceremonies: “If any man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” “And the prayer of faith shall cure the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”Thousands of the fatuous bigots who prayed for “meekness of spirit” continued to gorge themselves with the food of carnivorous animals, and thus inflamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorseless propensities of those brutes. Luigi Cornaro, the Italian reformer, assures us that it was no uncommon thing for a nobleman or prelate of his century to swallow fourteen pounds of strong meats at a single meal, and that, after invoking the blessing of Heaven upon such a repast, the devourer of meat-pies would rise with his paunch distended “like the hide of a drowned dog.” The “Love of Enemies,” “forgiveness and meekness,” were on their lips; but those fourteen pounds of meat-pie worked out their normal result; and among the carnivorous saints of that age we accordingly find men whose fiendish inhumanity would have appalled the roughest legionary of pagan Rome. Cæsar Borgia, the son of a highest ecclesiastic dignitary, a disciple of a priestly training-school, and himself a prince of the church, seems to have combined the stealthy cunning of a viper with the bloodthirst of a hyena. Four times he made and broke the most solemn treaties,[29]in order to get an opportunity to invade the territory of an unprepared neighbor. His campaigns were conducted with a truculence denounced even by his own allies; with his own hand he poisoned fourteen of his boon companions, in order to possess himself of their property; twenty-three of his political and clerical rivals were removed by the dagger of hired assassins or executed upon the testimony of suborned perjurers. He tried to poison his brother-in-law, Prince Alphonso of Aragon, in order to facilitate his design of seducing his own sister; he made repeated, and at last partly successful, attempts to poison the brother of his mother and his own father, the pope.The heartless neglect of sanitary provisions for the comfort of the poor avenges itself in epidemics that visit the abodes of wealth as well as the hovels of misery. A stall-fed preacher of our southern seaport towns may circulate a petition for the suppression of Sunday excursions, in order to prevent the recreation-needing toilers of his community from leaving town on St. Collection Day; he may advocate the arrest of bathing schoolboys, in order to suppress an undue love of physical enjoyments, or to gratify a female tithe-payer who seeks an opportunity of displaying her prudish virtue at the expense of the helpless; he may vote to suppress outdoor sports in the cool of the late evening, when the inhabitants of the tenement streets are trying to enjoy an hour of extra Sabbatarian recreation—a privilege to be reserved for the saints who can rest six days out of seven, and on the seventh harvest the fruits of other men’s labor. But epidemics refuse to recognize such distinctions,[30]and the vomit of yellow fever will force the most reverend monopolist to disgorge the proceeds of the tithes coined from the misery of consumptive factory children. Nor can wealth purchase immunity from the natural consequences of habitual vice. The dyspeptic glutton is a Tantalus who starves in the midst of abundance. The worn-out tradesman, whose restless toil in the mines of mammon has led to asthma or consumption, would vainly offer to barter half his gold for half a year of health. Thousands of families who deny themselves every recreation, who linger out the summer in the sweltering city, and toil and save “for the sake of our dear children,” have received Nature’s verdict on the wisdom of their course in the premature death of those children.[Contents]E.—REDEMPTION.It has often been said that the physical regeneration of the human race could be achieved without the aid of a miracle, if its systematic pursuit were followed with half the zeal which our stock-breeders bestow upon the rearing of their cows and horses. A general observance of the most clearly recognized laws of health would, indeed, abundantly suffice for that purpose. There is, for instance, no doubt that the morbid tendency of our indoor modes of occupation could be counteracted by gymnastics, and the trustees of our education fund should build a gymnasium near every town school. As a condition of health, pure air is as essential as pure water and food, and no house-owner should be permitted to sow[31]the seeds of deadly diseases by crowding his tenants into the back rooms of unaired and unairable slum-prisons. New cities should be projected on the plan of concentric rings of cottage suburbs (interspersed with parks and gardens), instead of successive strata of tenement flats.In every large town all friends of humanity should unite for the enforcement of Sunday freedom, and spare no pains to brand the Sabbath bigots as enemies of the human race. We should found Sunday gardens, where our toil-worn fellow-citizens could enjoy their holidays with outdoor sports and outdoor dances, free museums, temperance drinks, healthy refreshments, collections of botanical and zoölogical curiosities. Country excursions on the only leisure day of the laboring classes should be as free as air and sunshine, and every civilized community should have a Recreation League for the promotion of thatpurpose.In the second century of our chronological era the cities of the Roman empire vied in the establishment of free public baths. Antioch alone had fourteen of them; Alexandria not less than twelve, and Rome itself at least twenty, some of them of such magnificence and extent that their foundations have withstood the ravages of sixteen centuries. Many of those establishments were entirely free, and even theThermæ, or luxurious Warm Baths, of Caracalla admitted visitors for a gate-fee which all but the poorest could afford. Our boasted civilization will have to follow such examples before it can begin to deserve its name; and even the free circus games[32](by no means confined to the combats of armed prize-fighters) were preferable to the fanatical suppression of all popular sports which made the age of Puritanism the dreariest period of that dismal era known as the Reign of the Cross.The preservation of health is at least not less important than the preservation of Hebrew mythology; and communities who force their children to sacrifice a large portion of their time to the study of Asiatic miracle legends might well permit them to devote an occasional hour or two to the study of modern physiology. We should have health primers and teachers of hygiene, and the most primitive district school should find time for a few weekly lessons in the rudiments of sanitary science, such as the importance of ventilation, the best modes of exercise, the proper quality and quantity of our daily food, the significance of the stimulant habit, the use and abuse of dress, etc.Such text-books would prepare the way for health lectures, for health legislation and the reform of municipal hygiene. The untruth that “a man can not be defiled by things entering him from without” has been thoroughly exploded by the lessons of science, and should no longer excuse the neglect of thatfrugalitywhich in the times of the pagan republics formed the best safeguard of national vigor. Milk, bread, and fruit, instead of greasy viands, alcohol, and narcotic drinks, would soon modify the mortality statistics of our large cities, and we should not hesitate to recognize the truth that the remarkable[33]longevity of the Jews and Mohammedans has a great deal to do with their dread of impure food.

[Contents]CHAPTER I.HEALTH.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.Nature has guarded the health of her creatures by a marvelous system of protective intuitions. The sensitive membrane of the eye resents the intrusion of every foreign substance. An intuitive sense of discomfort announces every injurious extreme of temperature. To the unperverted taste of animals in a state of nature wholesome food is pleasant, injurious substances repulsive or insipid. Captain Kane found that only the rage of famine will tempt the foxes of the Arctic coastlands to touch spoiled meat. In times of scarcity the baboons of the Abyssinian mountains greedily hunt for edible roots, which an unerring faculty enables them to distinguish from the poisonous varieties. The naturalist Tschudi mentions a troop of half-tamed chamois forcing their way through a shingle roof, rather than pass a night in the stifling atmosphere of a goat stable.Man in his primitive state had his full share of those protective instincts, which still manifest themselves in children and Nature-guided savages. It is a mistake to suppose that the lowest of those savages[19]are naturally fond of ardent spirits. The travelers Park, Gerstaecker, Vambery, Kohl, De Tocqueville, and Brehm agree that the first step on the road to ruin is always taken in deference to the example of the admired superior race, if not in compliance with direct persuasion. The negroes of the Senegal highlands shuddered at the first taste of alcohol, but from a wish to conciliate the good will of their visitors hesitated to decline their invitations, which subsequently, indeed, became rather superfluous. The children of the wilderness unhesitatingly prefer the hardships of a winter camp to the atmospheric poisons of our tenement houses. Shamyl Ben Haddin, the Circassian war chief, whose iron constitution had endured the vicissitudes of thirty-four campaigns, pathetically protested against the pest air of his Russian prison cell, and warned his jailers that, unless his dormitory was changed, Heaven would hold them responsible for the guilt of his suicide. I have known country boys to step out into a shower of rain and sleet to escape from the contaminated atmosphere of a city workshop, and after a week’s work in a spinning mill return to the penury of their mountain homes, rather than purchase dainties at the expense of their lungs.The wordfrugality, in its original sense, referred literally to a diet of tree fruits, in distinction to carnivorous fare, and nine out of ten children still decidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to the richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-made clothes to the constraint of fashionable fripperies. The main tenets of our dress-reformers are[20]anticipated in the sensible garments of many half-civilized nations. Boys, within reach of a free bathing river, can dispense with the advice of the hydropathic school. They delight in exercise; they laugh at the imaginary danger of fresh-air draughts, and the perils of barefoot rambles in wet and dry. They would cast their vote in favor of the outdoor pursuit of hundreds of occupations which custom, rather than necessity, now associates with the disadvantages of indoor confinement. The hygienic influence of arboreal vegetation has been recognized by the ablest pathologists of modern times; avenues of shade trees have been found to redeem the sanitary condition of many a grimy city, and the eminent hygienist, Schrodt, holds that, as a remedial institution, a shady park is worth a dozen drug stores. But all these lessons only confirm an often manifested, and too often suppressed, instinct of our young children: their passionate love of woodland sports, their love of tree shade, of greenwood camps, of forest life in all its forms. Those who hold that “nature” is but a synonym of “habit” should witness the rapture of city children at first sight of forest glades and shady meadow brooks, and compare it with the city dread of the Swiss peasant lad or the American backwoods boy, sickened by the fumes and the uproar of a large manufacturing town. A thousands years of vice and abnormal habits have not yet silenced the voice of the physical conscience that recalls our steps to the path of Nature, and will not permit us to transgress her laws unwarned.[21][Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The reward of nature-abiding habits is not confined to the negative advantage of escaping the discomforts of disease. In the pursuit of countless competitive avocations the Art of Survival is a chief secret of success, but in this age of sanitary abuses our lives are mostly half-told tales. Our season ends before the trees of hope have time to ripen their fruit; before their day’s work is done our toilers are overtaken by the shadows of approaching night. Sanitary reforms would undoubtedly lengthen our average term of life, and an increase of longevity alone would solve the most vexing riddles of existence: the apparent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit and compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive promises and baffled hopes of life. For millions of our fellow-men an increase of health and longevity would suffice to make life decidedly worth living. Health lessens the temptations to many vices. Perfect health blesses its possessor with a spontaneous cheerfulness almost proof against the frowns of fortune and the cares of poverty. With a meal of barley cakes and milk, a straw couch, and scant clothing of homespun linen, a shepherd-boy in the highlands of the Austrian Alps may enjoy existence to a degree that exuberates in frolic and jubilant shouts, while all the resources of wealth cannot recall the sunshine which sickness has banished from the life of the dyspeptic glutton. If happiness could be computed by measure and weight, it would be found that her richest treasures are not stored in gilded walls, but[22]in the homes of frugal thrift, of rustic vigor and nature-loving independence. The sweetness of health reflects itself in grace of form and deportment, and wins friends where the elegance of studied manners gains only admirers. Health is also a primary condition of that clearness of mind the absence of which can be only partially compensated by the light of learning. Health is the basis of mental as of bodily vigor; country-bred boys have again and again carried off the prizes of academical honors from the pupils of refined cities, and the foremost reformers of all ages and countries have been men of the people; low-born, but not the less well-born, sons of hardy rustics and mechanics, from Moses, Socrates, Epictetus, Jesus Ben Josef, and Mohammed, to Luther, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.Habitual sin against the health-laws of Nature was originally chiefly a consequence of untoward circumstances. Slaves, paupers, immigrants to the inhospitable climes of the higher latitudes, were forced to adopt abnormal modes of life which, in the course of time, hardened into habits. Man, like all the varieties of his four-handed relatives, is a native of the tropics, and the diet of our earliest manlike ancestors was, in all probability,frugal: tree-fruits, berries, nuts, roots, and edible herbs and gums. But the first colonists of the winter lands were obliged to eke out an existence by eating the flesh of their fellow-creatures, and a carnivorous diet thus became the[23]habitual and, in many countries, almost the exclusive diet of the nomadic inhabitants.Alcohol is a product of fermentation, and the avarice of a cruel master may have forced his slaves to quench their thirst with fermented must or hydromel till habit begot a baneful second nature, and the at first reluctant victims of intoxication learned to preferspoiledto fresh grape-juice. Sedentary occupations, however distasteful at first, are apt to engender a sluggish aversion to physical exercise, and even habitual confinement in a vitiated atmosphere may at last become a second nature, characterized by a morbid dread of fresh air. The slaves of the Roman landowners had to pass their nights in prison-like dungeons, and may have contracted the first germ of that mental disease known as the night-air superstition, the idea, namely, that after dark the vitiated atmosphere of a stifling dormitory is preferable to the balm of the cooling night wind.In modern times an unprecedented concurrence of circumstances has stimulated a feverish haste in the pursuit of wealth, and thus indirectly led to the neglect of personal hygiene. The abolition of the public festivals by which the potentates of the pagan empires compensated their subjects for the loss of political freedom, the heartless egotism of our wealthy Pharisees, venal justice, and the dire bondage of city life all help to stimulate a headlong race toward the goal of the promised land of ease and independence—a goal reached only by a favored few compared with the multitudes who daily drop down wayworn and exhausted.[24]But the deadliest blow to the cause of health was struck by the anti-natural fanaticism of the Middle Ages, the world-hating infatuation of the maniacs who depreciated every secular blessing as a curse in disguise, and despised their own bodies as they despised nature, life, and earth. The disciples of the world-renouncing messiah actually welcomed disease as a sign of divine favor, they gloried in decrepitude and deformity, and promoted the work of degeneration with a persevering zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the human race. For a period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic history of Europe is the history of a systematic war against the interests of the human body; the “mortification of the flesh” was enjoined as a cardinal duty of a true believer; health-giving recreations were suppressed, while health-destroying vices were encouraged by the example of the clergy; domestic hygiene was utterly neglected, and the founders of some twenty-four different monastic orders vied in the invention of new penances and systematic outrages upon the health of the poor convent-slaves. Their diet was confined to the coarsest and often most loathsome food; they were subjected to weekly bleedings, to profitless hardships and deprivations; their sleep was broken night after night; fasting was carried to a length which often avenged itself in permanent insanity; and their only compensation for a daily repetition of health-destroying afflictions was the permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spirituous poisons: the same bigots who grudged their followers a night of unbroken rest or a mouthful of[25]digestible food indulged them in quantities of alcoholic beverages that would have staggered the conscience of a modern beer-swiller.The bodily health of a community was held so utterly below the attention of a Christian magistrate that every large city became a hotbed of contagious diseases; small-pox and scrofula became pandemic disorders; the pestilence of the Black Death ravaged Europe from end to end—nay, instead of trying to remove the cause of the evil, the wretched victims were advised to seek relief in prayer and self-torture, and a philosopher uttering a word of protest against such illusions would have risked to have his tongue torn out by the roots and his body consigned to the flames of the stake.Mankind has never wholly recovered from that reign of insanity. Indifference to many of the plainest health-laws of nature is still the reproach of our so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no time to expurgate the slums of their own cities; our missionary societies spend millions to acquaint the natives of distant islands with the ceremony of baptism, but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment of free public baths for the benefit of their poor neighbors, whose children are scourged or caged like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of the next river. Temperance, indeed, is preached in the name of the miracle-monger who turned water into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to drown their misery in the Lethe of intoxication are[26]deprived of every healthier pastime; the magistrates of our wealthy cities rage with penal ordinances against the abettors of public amusements on the day when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leisure for recreation. Poor factory children who would spend the holidays in the paradise of the green hills are lured into the baited trap of a Sabbath-school and bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew ghost-stories or the records of fictitious genealogies; but the offer to enlarge the educational sphere of our public schools by the introduction of a health primer would be scornfully rejected as an attempt to divert the attention of the pupils from more important topics.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.But the laws of Nature cannot be outraged with impunity, and the aid of supernatural agencies has never yet protected our ghost-mongers from the consequences of their sins against the monitions of their physical conscience. The neglect of cleanliness avenges itself in diseases which no prayer can avert; during the most filthful and prayerful period of the Middle Ages, seven out of ten city-dwellers were subject to scrofula of that especially malignant form that attacks the glands and the arteries as well as the skin. Medical nostrums and clerical hocus-pocus of the ordinary sort were, indeed, so notoriously unavailing against that virulent affection that thousands of sufferers took long journeys to try the efficacy of aking’stouch, as recorded by the unanimous testimony of contemporary writers, as well as in the still[27]current term of asovereignremedy. A long foot-journey, with its opportunities for physical exercise, outdoor camps, and changes of diet, often really effected the desired result; but, on their return to their reeking hovels, the convalescents experienced a speedy relapse, and had either to repeat the wearisome journey or resign themselves to the “mysterious dispensation” of a Providence which obstinately refused to let miracles interfere with the normal operation of the physiological laws recorded in the protests of instinct. Stench, nausea, and sick-headaches might, indeed, have enforced those protests upon the attention of the sufferers; but the disciples of Antinaturalism had been taught to mistrust the promptings of their natural desires, and to accept discomforts as signs of divine favor, or, in extreme cases, to trust their abatement to the intercession of the saints, rather than to the profane interference of secular science.The dungeon-life of the monastic maniacs, and the abject submission to the nuisance of atmospheric impurities, avenged themselves in the ravages of pulmonary consumption; the votaries of dungeon-smells were taught the value of fresh air by the tortures of an affliction from which only the removal of the cause could deliver a victim, and millions of orthodox citizens died scores of years before the attainment of a life-term which a seemingly inscrutable dispensation of Heaven grants to the unbelieving savages of the wilderness. The cheapest of all remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable abundance, craving admission and offering them the[28]aid which Nature grants even to the lowliest of her creatures, but a son of a miracle-working church had no concern with such things, and was enjoined to rely on the efficacy of mystic ceremonies: “If any man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” “And the prayer of faith shall cure the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”Thousands of the fatuous bigots who prayed for “meekness of spirit” continued to gorge themselves with the food of carnivorous animals, and thus inflamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorseless propensities of those brutes. Luigi Cornaro, the Italian reformer, assures us that it was no uncommon thing for a nobleman or prelate of his century to swallow fourteen pounds of strong meats at a single meal, and that, after invoking the blessing of Heaven upon such a repast, the devourer of meat-pies would rise with his paunch distended “like the hide of a drowned dog.” The “Love of Enemies,” “forgiveness and meekness,” were on their lips; but those fourteen pounds of meat-pie worked out their normal result; and among the carnivorous saints of that age we accordingly find men whose fiendish inhumanity would have appalled the roughest legionary of pagan Rome. Cæsar Borgia, the son of a highest ecclesiastic dignitary, a disciple of a priestly training-school, and himself a prince of the church, seems to have combined the stealthy cunning of a viper with the bloodthirst of a hyena. Four times he made and broke the most solemn treaties,[29]in order to get an opportunity to invade the territory of an unprepared neighbor. His campaigns were conducted with a truculence denounced even by his own allies; with his own hand he poisoned fourteen of his boon companions, in order to possess himself of their property; twenty-three of his political and clerical rivals were removed by the dagger of hired assassins or executed upon the testimony of suborned perjurers. He tried to poison his brother-in-law, Prince Alphonso of Aragon, in order to facilitate his design of seducing his own sister; he made repeated, and at last partly successful, attempts to poison the brother of his mother and his own father, the pope.The heartless neglect of sanitary provisions for the comfort of the poor avenges itself in epidemics that visit the abodes of wealth as well as the hovels of misery. A stall-fed preacher of our southern seaport towns may circulate a petition for the suppression of Sunday excursions, in order to prevent the recreation-needing toilers of his community from leaving town on St. Collection Day; he may advocate the arrest of bathing schoolboys, in order to suppress an undue love of physical enjoyments, or to gratify a female tithe-payer who seeks an opportunity of displaying her prudish virtue at the expense of the helpless; he may vote to suppress outdoor sports in the cool of the late evening, when the inhabitants of the tenement streets are trying to enjoy an hour of extra Sabbatarian recreation—a privilege to be reserved for the saints who can rest six days out of seven, and on the seventh harvest the fruits of other men’s labor. But epidemics refuse to recognize such distinctions,[30]and the vomit of yellow fever will force the most reverend monopolist to disgorge the proceeds of the tithes coined from the misery of consumptive factory children. Nor can wealth purchase immunity from the natural consequences of habitual vice. The dyspeptic glutton is a Tantalus who starves in the midst of abundance. The worn-out tradesman, whose restless toil in the mines of mammon has led to asthma or consumption, would vainly offer to barter half his gold for half a year of health. Thousands of families who deny themselves every recreation, who linger out the summer in the sweltering city, and toil and save “for the sake of our dear children,” have received Nature’s verdict on the wisdom of their course in the premature death of those children.[Contents]E.—REDEMPTION.It has often been said that the physical regeneration of the human race could be achieved without the aid of a miracle, if its systematic pursuit were followed with half the zeal which our stock-breeders bestow upon the rearing of their cows and horses. A general observance of the most clearly recognized laws of health would, indeed, abundantly suffice for that purpose. There is, for instance, no doubt that the morbid tendency of our indoor modes of occupation could be counteracted by gymnastics, and the trustees of our education fund should build a gymnasium near every town school. As a condition of health, pure air is as essential as pure water and food, and no house-owner should be permitted to sow[31]the seeds of deadly diseases by crowding his tenants into the back rooms of unaired and unairable slum-prisons. New cities should be projected on the plan of concentric rings of cottage suburbs (interspersed with parks and gardens), instead of successive strata of tenement flats.In every large town all friends of humanity should unite for the enforcement of Sunday freedom, and spare no pains to brand the Sabbath bigots as enemies of the human race. We should found Sunday gardens, where our toil-worn fellow-citizens could enjoy their holidays with outdoor sports and outdoor dances, free museums, temperance drinks, healthy refreshments, collections of botanical and zoölogical curiosities. Country excursions on the only leisure day of the laboring classes should be as free as air and sunshine, and every civilized community should have a Recreation League for the promotion of thatpurpose.In the second century of our chronological era the cities of the Roman empire vied in the establishment of free public baths. Antioch alone had fourteen of them; Alexandria not less than twelve, and Rome itself at least twenty, some of them of such magnificence and extent that their foundations have withstood the ravages of sixteen centuries. Many of those establishments were entirely free, and even theThermæ, or luxurious Warm Baths, of Caracalla admitted visitors for a gate-fee which all but the poorest could afford. Our boasted civilization will have to follow such examples before it can begin to deserve its name; and even the free circus games[32](by no means confined to the combats of armed prize-fighters) were preferable to the fanatical suppression of all popular sports which made the age of Puritanism the dreariest period of that dismal era known as the Reign of the Cross.The preservation of health is at least not less important than the preservation of Hebrew mythology; and communities who force their children to sacrifice a large portion of their time to the study of Asiatic miracle legends might well permit them to devote an occasional hour or two to the study of modern physiology. We should have health primers and teachers of hygiene, and the most primitive district school should find time for a few weekly lessons in the rudiments of sanitary science, such as the importance of ventilation, the best modes of exercise, the proper quality and quantity of our daily food, the significance of the stimulant habit, the use and abuse of dress, etc.Such text-books would prepare the way for health lectures, for health legislation and the reform of municipal hygiene. The untruth that “a man can not be defiled by things entering him from without” has been thoroughly exploded by the lessons of science, and should no longer excuse the neglect of thatfrugalitywhich in the times of the pagan republics formed the best safeguard of national vigor. Milk, bread, and fruit, instead of greasy viands, alcohol, and narcotic drinks, would soon modify the mortality statistics of our large cities, and we should not hesitate to recognize the truth that the remarkable[33]longevity of the Jews and Mohammedans has a great deal to do with their dread of impure food.

CHAPTER I.HEALTH.

[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.Nature has guarded the health of her creatures by a marvelous system of protective intuitions. The sensitive membrane of the eye resents the intrusion of every foreign substance. An intuitive sense of discomfort announces every injurious extreme of temperature. To the unperverted taste of animals in a state of nature wholesome food is pleasant, injurious substances repulsive or insipid. Captain Kane found that only the rage of famine will tempt the foxes of the Arctic coastlands to touch spoiled meat. In times of scarcity the baboons of the Abyssinian mountains greedily hunt for edible roots, which an unerring faculty enables them to distinguish from the poisonous varieties. The naturalist Tschudi mentions a troop of half-tamed chamois forcing their way through a shingle roof, rather than pass a night in the stifling atmosphere of a goat stable.Man in his primitive state had his full share of those protective instincts, which still manifest themselves in children and Nature-guided savages. It is a mistake to suppose that the lowest of those savages[19]are naturally fond of ardent spirits. The travelers Park, Gerstaecker, Vambery, Kohl, De Tocqueville, and Brehm agree that the first step on the road to ruin is always taken in deference to the example of the admired superior race, if not in compliance with direct persuasion. The negroes of the Senegal highlands shuddered at the first taste of alcohol, but from a wish to conciliate the good will of their visitors hesitated to decline their invitations, which subsequently, indeed, became rather superfluous. The children of the wilderness unhesitatingly prefer the hardships of a winter camp to the atmospheric poisons of our tenement houses. Shamyl Ben Haddin, the Circassian war chief, whose iron constitution had endured the vicissitudes of thirty-four campaigns, pathetically protested against the pest air of his Russian prison cell, and warned his jailers that, unless his dormitory was changed, Heaven would hold them responsible for the guilt of his suicide. I have known country boys to step out into a shower of rain and sleet to escape from the contaminated atmosphere of a city workshop, and after a week’s work in a spinning mill return to the penury of their mountain homes, rather than purchase dainties at the expense of their lungs.The wordfrugality, in its original sense, referred literally to a diet of tree fruits, in distinction to carnivorous fare, and nine out of ten children still decidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to the richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-made clothes to the constraint of fashionable fripperies. The main tenets of our dress-reformers are[20]anticipated in the sensible garments of many half-civilized nations. Boys, within reach of a free bathing river, can dispense with the advice of the hydropathic school. They delight in exercise; they laugh at the imaginary danger of fresh-air draughts, and the perils of barefoot rambles in wet and dry. They would cast their vote in favor of the outdoor pursuit of hundreds of occupations which custom, rather than necessity, now associates with the disadvantages of indoor confinement. The hygienic influence of arboreal vegetation has been recognized by the ablest pathologists of modern times; avenues of shade trees have been found to redeem the sanitary condition of many a grimy city, and the eminent hygienist, Schrodt, holds that, as a remedial institution, a shady park is worth a dozen drug stores. But all these lessons only confirm an often manifested, and too often suppressed, instinct of our young children: their passionate love of woodland sports, their love of tree shade, of greenwood camps, of forest life in all its forms. Those who hold that “nature” is but a synonym of “habit” should witness the rapture of city children at first sight of forest glades and shady meadow brooks, and compare it with the city dread of the Swiss peasant lad or the American backwoods boy, sickened by the fumes and the uproar of a large manufacturing town. A thousands years of vice and abnormal habits have not yet silenced the voice of the physical conscience that recalls our steps to the path of Nature, and will not permit us to transgress her laws unwarned.[21][Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The reward of nature-abiding habits is not confined to the negative advantage of escaping the discomforts of disease. In the pursuit of countless competitive avocations the Art of Survival is a chief secret of success, but in this age of sanitary abuses our lives are mostly half-told tales. Our season ends before the trees of hope have time to ripen their fruit; before their day’s work is done our toilers are overtaken by the shadows of approaching night. Sanitary reforms would undoubtedly lengthen our average term of life, and an increase of longevity alone would solve the most vexing riddles of existence: the apparent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit and compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive promises and baffled hopes of life. For millions of our fellow-men an increase of health and longevity would suffice to make life decidedly worth living. Health lessens the temptations to many vices. Perfect health blesses its possessor with a spontaneous cheerfulness almost proof against the frowns of fortune and the cares of poverty. With a meal of barley cakes and milk, a straw couch, and scant clothing of homespun linen, a shepherd-boy in the highlands of the Austrian Alps may enjoy existence to a degree that exuberates in frolic and jubilant shouts, while all the resources of wealth cannot recall the sunshine which sickness has banished from the life of the dyspeptic glutton. If happiness could be computed by measure and weight, it would be found that her richest treasures are not stored in gilded walls, but[22]in the homes of frugal thrift, of rustic vigor and nature-loving independence. The sweetness of health reflects itself in grace of form and deportment, and wins friends where the elegance of studied manners gains only admirers. Health is also a primary condition of that clearness of mind the absence of which can be only partially compensated by the light of learning. Health is the basis of mental as of bodily vigor; country-bred boys have again and again carried off the prizes of academical honors from the pupils of refined cities, and the foremost reformers of all ages and countries have been men of the people; low-born, but not the less well-born, sons of hardy rustics and mechanics, from Moses, Socrates, Epictetus, Jesus Ben Josef, and Mohammed, to Luther, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.Habitual sin against the health-laws of Nature was originally chiefly a consequence of untoward circumstances. Slaves, paupers, immigrants to the inhospitable climes of the higher latitudes, were forced to adopt abnormal modes of life which, in the course of time, hardened into habits. Man, like all the varieties of his four-handed relatives, is a native of the tropics, and the diet of our earliest manlike ancestors was, in all probability,frugal: tree-fruits, berries, nuts, roots, and edible herbs and gums. But the first colonists of the winter lands were obliged to eke out an existence by eating the flesh of their fellow-creatures, and a carnivorous diet thus became the[23]habitual and, in many countries, almost the exclusive diet of the nomadic inhabitants.Alcohol is a product of fermentation, and the avarice of a cruel master may have forced his slaves to quench their thirst with fermented must or hydromel till habit begot a baneful second nature, and the at first reluctant victims of intoxication learned to preferspoiledto fresh grape-juice. Sedentary occupations, however distasteful at first, are apt to engender a sluggish aversion to physical exercise, and even habitual confinement in a vitiated atmosphere may at last become a second nature, characterized by a morbid dread of fresh air. The slaves of the Roman landowners had to pass their nights in prison-like dungeons, and may have contracted the first germ of that mental disease known as the night-air superstition, the idea, namely, that after dark the vitiated atmosphere of a stifling dormitory is preferable to the balm of the cooling night wind.In modern times an unprecedented concurrence of circumstances has stimulated a feverish haste in the pursuit of wealth, and thus indirectly led to the neglect of personal hygiene. The abolition of the public festivals by which the potentates of the pagan empires compensated their subjects for the loss of political freedom, the heartless egotism of our wealthy Pharisees, venal justice, and the dire bondage of city life all help to stimulate a headlong race toward the goal of the promised land of ease and independence—a goal reached only by a favored few compared with the multitudes who daily drop down wayworn and exhausted.[24]But the deadliest blow to the cause of health was struck by the anti-natural fanaticism of the Middle Ages, the world-hating infatuation of the maniacs who depreciated every secular blessing as a curse in disguise, and despised their own bodies as they despised nature, life, and earth. The disciples of the world-renouncing messiah actually welcomed disease as a sign of divine favor, they gloried in decrepitude and deformity, and promoted the work of degeneration with a persevering zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the human race. For a period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic history of Europe is the history of a systematic war against the interests of the human body; the “mortification of the flesh” was enjoined as a cardinal duty of a true believer; health-giving recreations were suppressed, while health-destroying vices were encouraged by the example of the clergy; domestic hygiene was utterly neglected, and the founders of some twenty-four different monastic orders vied in the invention of new penances and systematic outrages upon the health of the poor convent-slaves. Their diet was confined to the coarsest and often most loathsome food; they were subjected to weekly bleedings, to profitless hardships and deprivations; their sleep was broken night after night; fasting was carried to a length which often avenged itself in permanent insanity; and their only compensation for a daily repetition of health-destroying afflictions was the permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spirituous poisons: the same bigots who grudged their followers a night of unbroken rest or a mouthful of[25]digestible food indulged them in quantities of alcoholic beverages that would have staggered the conscience of a modern beer-swiller.The bodily health of a community was held so utterly below the attention of a Christian magistrate that every large city became a hotbed of contagious diseases; small-pox and scrofula became pandemic disorders; the pestilence of the Black Death ravaged Europe from end to end—nay, instead of trying to remove the cause of the evil, the wretched victims were advised to seek relief in prayer and self-torture, and a philosopher uttering a word of protest against such illusions would have risked to have his tongue torn out by the roots and his body consigned to the flames of the stake.Mankind has never wholly recovered from that reign of insanity. Indifference to many of the plainest health-laws of nature is still the reproach of our so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no time to expurgate the slums of their own cities; our missionary societies spend millions to acquaint the natives of distant islands with the ceremony of baptism, but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment of free public baths for the benefit of their poor neighbors, whose children are scourged or caged like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of the next river. Temperance, indeed, is preached in the name of the miracle-monger who turned water into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to drown their misery in the Lethe of intoxication are[26]deprived of every healthier pastime; the magistrates of our wealthy cities rage with penal ordinances against the abettors of public amusements on the day when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leisure for recreation. Poor factory children who would spend the holidays in the paradise of the green hills are lured into the baited trap of a Sabbath-school and bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew ghost-stories or the records of fictitious genealogies; but the offer to enlarge the educational sphere of our public schools by the introduction of a health primer would be scornfully rejected as an attempt to divert the attention of the pupils from more important topics.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.But the laws of Nature cannot be outraged with impunity, and the aid of supernatural agencies has never yet protected our ghost-mongers from the consequences of their sins against the monitions of their physical conscience. The neglect of cleanliness avenges itself in diseases which no prayer can avert; during the most filthful and prayerful period of the Middle Ages, seven out of ten city-dwellers were subject to scrofula of that especially malignant form that attacks the glands and the arteries as well as the skin. Medical nostrums and clerical hocus-pocus of the ordinary sort were, indeed, so notoriously unavailing against that virulent affection that thousands of sufferers took long journeys to try the efficacy of aking’stouch, as recorded by the unanimous testimony of contemporary writers, as well as in the still[27]current term of asovereignremedy. A long foot-journey, with its opportunities for physical exercise, outdoor camps, and changes of diet, often really effected the desired result; but, on their return to their reeking hovels, the convalescents experienced a speedy relapse, and had either to repeat the wearisome journey or resign themselves to the “mysterious dispensation” of a Providence which obstinately refused to let miracles interfere with the normal operation of the physiological laws recorded in the protests of instinct. Stench, nausea, and sick-headaches might, indeed, have enforced those protests upon the attention of the sufferers; but the disciples of Antinaturalism had been taught to mistrust the promptings of their natural desires, and to accept discomforts as signs of divine favor, or, in extreme cases, to trust their abatement to the intercession of the saints, rather than to the profane interference of secular science.The dungeon-life of the monastic maniacs, and the abject submission to the nuisance of atmospheric impurities, avenged themselves in the ravages of pulmonary consumption; the votaries of dungeon-smells were taught the value of fresh air by the tortures of an affliction from which only the removal of the cause could deliver a victim, and millions of orthodox citizens died scores of years before the attainment of a life-term which a seemingly inscrutable dispensation of Heaven grants to the unbelieving savages of the wilderness. The cheapest of all remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable abundance, craving admission and offering them the[28]aid which Nature grants even to the lowliest of her creatures, but a son of a miracle-working church had no concern with such things, and was enjoined to rely on the efficacy of mystic ceremonies: “If any man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” “And the prayer of faith shall cure the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”Thousands of the fatuous bigots who prayed for “meekness of spirit” continued to gorge themselves with the food of carnivorous animals, and thus inflamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorseless propensities of those brutes. Luigi Cornaro, the Italian reformer, assures us that it was no uncommon thing for a nobleman or prelate of his century to swallow fourteen pounds of strong meats at a single meal, and that, after invoking the blessing of Heaven upon such a repast, the devourer of meat-pies would rise with his paunch distended “like the hide of a drowned dog.” The “Love of Enemies,” “forgiveness and meekness,” were on their lips; but those fourteen pounds of meat-pie worked out their normal result; and among the carnivorous saints of that age we accordingly find men whose fiendish inhumanity would have appalled the roughest legionary of pagan Rome. Cæsar Borgia, the son of a highest ecclesiastic dignitary, a disciple of a priestly training-school, and himself a prince of the church, seems to have combined the stealthy cunning of a viper with the bloodthirst of a hyena. Four times he made and broke the most solemn treaties,[29]in order to get an opportunity to invade the territory of an unprepared neighbor. His campaigns were conducted with a truculence denounced even by his own allies; with his own hand he poisoned fourteen of his boon companions, in order to possess himself of their property; twenty-three of his political and clerical rivals were removed by the dagger of hired assassins or executed upon the testimony of suborned perjurers. He tried to poison his brother-in-law, Prince Alphonso of Aragon, in order to facilitate his design of seducing his own sister; he made repeated, and at last partly successful, attempts to poison the brother of his mother and his own father, the pope.The heartless neglect of sanitary provisions for the comfort of the poor avenges itself in epidemics that visit the abodes of wealth as well as the hovels of misery. A stall-fed preacher of our southern seaport towns may circulate a petition for the suppression of Sunday excursions, in order to prevent the recreation-needing toilers of his community from leaving town on St. Collection Day; he may advocate the arrest of bathing schoolboys, in order to suppress an undue love of physical enjoyments, or to gratify a female tithe-payer who seeks an opportunity of displaying her prudish virtue at the expense of the helpless; he may vote to suppress outdoor sports in the cool of the late evening, when the inhabitants of the tenement streets are trying to enjoy an hour of extra Sabbatarian recreation—a privilege to be reserved for the saints who can rest six days out of seven, and on the seventh harvest the fruits of other men’s labor. But epidemics refuse to recognize such distinctions,[30]and the vomit of yellow fever will force the most reverend monopolist to disgorge the proceeds of the tithes coined from the misery of consumptive factory children. Nor can wealth purchase immunity from the natural consequences of habitual vice. The dyspeptic glutton is a Tantalus who starves in the midst of abundance. The worn-out tradesman, whose restless toil in the mines of mammon has led to asthma or consumption, would vainly offer to barter half his gold for half a year of health. Thousands of families who deny themselves every recreation, who linger out the summer in the sweltering city, and toil and save “for the sake of our dear children,” have received Nature’s verdict on the wisdom of their course in the premature death of those children.[Contents]E.—REDEMPTION.It has often been said that the physical regeneration of the human race could be achieved without the aid of a miracle, if its systematic pursuit were followed with half the zeal which our stock-breeders bestow upon the rearing of their cows and horses. A general observance of the most clearly recognized laws of health would, indeed, abundantly suffice for that purpose. There is, for instance, no doubt that the morbid tendency of our indoor modes of occupation could be counteracted by gymnastics, and the trustees of our education fund should build a gymnasium near every town school. As a condition of health, pure air is as essential as pure water and food, and no house-owner should be permitted to sow[31]the seeds of deadly diseases by crowding his tenants into the back rooms of unaired and unairable slum-prisons. New cities should be projected on the plan of concentric rings of cottage suburbs (interspersed with parks and gardens), instead of successive strata of tenement flats.In every large town all friends of humanity should unite for the enforcement of Sunday freedom, and spare no pains to brand the Sabbath bigots as enemies of the human race. We should found Sunday gardens, where our toil-worn fellow-citizens could enjoy their holidays with outdoor sports and outdoor dances, free museums, temperance drinks, healthy refreshments, collections of botanical and zoölogical curiosities. Country excursions on the only leisure day of the laboring classes should be as free as air and sunshine, and every civilized community should have a Recreation League for the promotion of thatpurpose.In the second century of our chronological era the cities of the Roman empire vied in the establishment of free public baths. Antioch alone had fourteen of them; Alexandria not less than twelve, and Rome itself at least twenty, some of them of such magnificence and extent that their foundations have withstood the ravages of sixteen centuries. Many of those establishments were entirely free, and even theThermæ, or luxurious Warm Baths, of Caracalla admitted visitors for a gate-fee which all but the poorest could afford. Our boasted civilization will have to follow such examples before it can begin to deserve its name; and even the free circus games[32](by no means confined to the combats of armed prize-fighters) were preferable to the fanatical suppression of all popular sports which made the age of Puritanism the dreariest period of that dismal era known as the Reign of the Cross.The preservation of health is at least not less important than the preservation of Hebrew mythology; and communities who force their children to sacrifice a large portion of their time to the study of Asiatic miracle legends might well permit them to devote an occasional hour or two to the study of modern physiology. We should have health primers and teachers of hygiene, and the most primitive district school should find time for a few weekly lessons in the rudiments of sanitary science, such as the importance of ventilation, the best modes of exercise, the proper quality and quantity of our daily food, the significance of the stimulant habit, the use and abuse of dress, etc.Such text-books would prepare the way for health lectures, for health legislation and the reform of municipal hygiene. The untruth that “a man can not be defiled by things entering him from without” has been thoroughly exploded by the lessons of science, and should no longer excuse the neglect of thatfrugalitywhich in the times of the pagan republics formed the best safeguard of national vigor. Milk, bread, and fruit, instead of greasy viands, alcohol, and narcotic drinks, would soon modify the mortality statistics of our large cities, and we should not hesitate to recognize the truth that the remarkable[33]longevity of the Jews and Mohammedans has a great deal to do with their dread of impure food.

[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.Nature has guarded the health of her creatures by a marvelous system of protective intuitions. The sensitive membrane of the eye resents the intrusion of every foreign substance. An intuitive sense of discomfort announces every injurious extreme of temperature. To the unperverted taste of animals in a state of nature wholesome food is pleasant, injurious substances repulsive or insipid. Captain Kane found that only the rage of famine will tempt the foxes of the Arctic coastlands to touch spoiled meat. In times of scarcity the baboons of the Abyssinian mountains greedily hunt for edible roots, which an unerring faculty enables them to distinguish from the poisonous varieties. The naturalist Tschudi mentions a troop of half-tamed chamois forcing their way through a shingle roof, rather than pass a night in the stifling atmosphere of a goat stable.Man in his primitive state had his full share of those protective instincts, which still manifest themselves in children and Nature-guided savages. It is a mistake to suppose that the lowest of those savages[19]are naturally fond of ardent spirits. The travelers Park, Gerstaecker, Vambery, Kohl, De Tocqueville, and Brehm agree that the first step on the road to ruin is always taken in deference to the example of the admired superior race, if not in compliance with direct persuasion. The negroes of the Senegal highlands shuddered at the first taste of alcohol, but from a wish to conciliate the good will of their visitors hesitated to decline their invitations, which subsequently, indeed, became rather superfluous. The children of the wilderness unhesitatingly prefer the hardships of a winter camp to the atmospheric poisons of our tenement houses. Shamyl Ben Haddin, the Circassian war chief, whose iron constitution had endured the vicissitudes of thirty-four campaigns, pathetically protested against the pest air of his Russian prison cell, and warned his jailers that, unless his dormitory was changed, Heaven would hold them responsible for the guilt of his suicide. I have known country boys to step out into a shower of rain and sleet to escape from the contaminated atmosphere of a city workshop, and after a week’s work in a spinning mill return to the penury of their mountain homes, rather than purchase dainties at the expense of their lungs.The wordfrugality, in its original sense, referred literally to a diet of tree fruits, in distinction to carnivorous fare, and nine out of ten children still decidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to the richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-made clothes to the constraint of fashionable fripperies. The main tenets of our dress-reformers are[20]anticipated in the sensible garments of many half-civilized nations. Boys, within reach of a free bathing river, can dispense with the advice of the hydropathic school. They delight in exercise; they laugh at the imaginary danger of fresh-air draughts, and the perils of barefoot rambles in wet and dry. They would cast their vote in favor of the outdoor pursuit of hundreds of occupations which custom, rather than necessity, now associates with the disadvantages of indoor confinement. The hygienic influence of arboreal vegetation has been recognized by the ablest pathologists of modern times; avenues of shade trees have been found to redeem the sanitary condition of many a grimy city, and the eminent hygienist, Schrodt, holds that, as a remedial institution, a shady park is worth a dozen drug stores. But all these lessons only confirm an often manifested, and too often suppressed, instinct of our young children: their passionate love of woodland sports, their love of tree shade, of greenwood camps, of forest life in all its forms. Those who hold that “nature” is but a synonym of “habit” should witness the rapture of city children at first sight of forest glades and shady meadow brooks, and compare it with the city dread of the Swiss peasant lad or the American backwoods boy, sickened by the fumes and the uproar of a large manufacturing town. A thousands years of vice and abnormal habits have not yet silenced the voice of the physical conscience that recalls our steps to the path of Nature, and will not permit us to transgress her laws unwarned.[21]

A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

Nature has guarded the health of her creatures by a marvelous system of protective intuitions. The sensitive membrane of the eye resents the intrusion of every foreign substance. An intuitive sense of discomfort announces every injurious extreme of temperature. To the unperverted taste of animals in a state of nature wholesome food is pleasant, injurious substances repulsive or insipid. Captain Kane found that only the rage of famine will tempt the foxes of the Arctic coastlands to touch spoiled meat. In times of scarcity the baboons of the Abyssinian mountains greedily hunt for edible roots, which an unerring faculty enables them to distinguish from the poisonous varieties. The naturalist Tschudi mentions a troop of half-tamed chamois forcing their way through a shingle roof, rather than pass a night in the stifling atmosphere of a goat stable.Man in his primitive state had his full share of those protective instincts, which still manifest themselves in children and Nature-guided savages. It is a mistake to suppose that the lowest of those savages[19]are naturally fond of ardent spirits. The travelers Park, Gerstaecker, Vambery, Kohl, De Tocqueville, and Brehm agree that the first step on the road to ruin is always taken in deference to the example of the admired superior race, if not in compliance with direct persuasion. The negroes of the Senegal highlands shuddered at the first taste of alcohol, but from a wish to conciliate the good will of their visitors hesitated to decline their invitations, which subsequently, indeed, became rather superfluous. The children of the wilderness unhesitatingly prefer the hardships of a winter camp to the atmospheric poisons of our tenement houses. Shamyl Ben Haddin, the Circassian war chief, whose iron constitution had endured the vicissitudes of thirty-four campaigns, pathetically protested against the pest air of his Russian prison cell, and warned his jailers that, unless his dormitory was changed, Heaven would hold them responsible for the guilt of his suicide. I have known country boys to step out into a shower of rain and sleet to escape from the contaminated atmosphere of a city workshop, and after a week’s work in a spinning mill return to the penury of their mountain homes, rather than purchase dainties at the expense of their lungs.The wordfrugality, in its original sense, referred literally to a diet of tree fruits, in distinction to carnivorous fare, and nine out of ten children still decidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to the richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-made clothes to the constraint of fashionable fripperies. The main tenets of our dress-reformers are[20]anticipated in the sensible garments of many half-civilized nations. Boys, within reach of a free bathing river, can dispense with the advice of the hydropathic school. They delight in exercise; they laugh at the imaginary danger of fresh-air draughts, and the perils of barefoot rambles in wet and dry. They would cast their vote in favor of the outdoor pursuit of hundreds of occupations which custom, rather than necessity, now associates with the disadvantages of indoor confinement. The hygienic influence of arboreal vegetation has been recognized by the ablest pathologists of modern times; avenues of shade trees have been found to redeem the sanitary condition of many a grimy city, and the eminent hygienist, Schrodt, holds that, as a remedial institution, a shady park is worth a dozen drug stores. But all these lessons only confirm an often manifested, and too often suppressed, instinct of our young children: their passionate love of woodland sports, their love of tree shade, of greenwood camps, of forest life in all its forms. Those who hold that “nature” is but a synonym of “habit” should witness the rapture of city children at first sight of forest glades and shady meadow brooks, and compare it with the city dread of the Swiss peasant lad or the American backwoods boy, sickened by the fumes and the uproar of a large manufacturing town. A thousands years of vice and abnormal habits have not yet silenced the voice of the physical conscience that recalls our steps to the path of Nature, and will not permit us to transgress her laws unwarned.[21]

Nature has guarded the health of her creatures by a marvelous system of protective intuitions. The sensitive membrane of the eye resents the intrusion of every foreign substance. An intuitive sense of discomfort announces every injurious extreme of temperature. To the unperverted taste of animals in a state of nature wholesome food is pleasant, injurious substances repulsive or insipid. Captain Kane found that only the rage of famine will tempt the foxes of the Arctic coastlands to touch spoiled meat. In times of scarcity the baboons of the Abyssinian mountains greedily hunt for edible roots, which an unerring faculty enables them to distinguish from the poisonous varieties. The naturalist Tschudi mentions a troop of half-tamed chamois forcing their way through a shingle roof, rather than pass a night in the stifling atmosphere of a goat stable.

Man in his primitive state had his full share of those protective instincts, which still manifest themselves in children and Nature-guided savages. It is a mistake to suppose that the lowest of those savages[19]are naturally fond of ardent spirits. The travelers Park, Gerstaecker, Vambery, Kohl, De Tocqueville, and Brehm agree that the first step on the road to ruin is always taken in deference to the example of the admired superior race, if not in compliance with direct persuasion. The negroes of the Senegal highlands shuddered at the first taste of alcohol, but from a wish to conciliate the good will of their visitors hesitated to decline their invitations, which subsequently, indeed, became rather superfluous. The children of the wilderness unhesitatingly prefer the hardships of a winter camp to the atmospheric poisons of our tenement houses. Shamyl Ben Haddin, the Circassian war chief, whose iron constitution had endured the vicissitudes of thirty-four campaigns, pathetically protested against the pest air of his Russian prison cell, and warned his jailers that, unless his dormitory was changed, Heaven would hold them responsible for the guilt of his suicide. I have known country boys to step out into a shower of rain and sleet to escape from the contaminated atmosphere of a city workshop, and after a week’s work in a spinning mill return to the penury of their mountain homes, rather than purchase dainties at the expense of their lungs.

The wordfrugality, in its original sense, referred literally to a diet of tree fruits, in distinction to carnivorous fare, and nine out of ten children still decidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to the richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-made clothes to the constraint of fashionable fripperies. The main tenets of our dress-reformers are[20]anticipated in the sensible garments of many half-civilized nations. Boys, within reach of a free bathing river, can dispense with the advice of the hydropathic school. They delight in exercise; they laugh at the imaginary danger of fresh-air draughts, and the perils of barefoot rambles in wet and dry. They would cast their vote in favor of the outdoor pursuit of hundreds of occupations which custom, rather than necessity, now associates with the disadvantages of indoor confinement. The hygienic influence of arboreal vegetation has been recognized by the ablest pathologists of modern times; avenues of shade trees have been found to redeem the sanitary condition of many a grimy city, and the eminent hygienist, Schrodt, holds that, as a remedial institution, a shady park is worth a dozen drug stores. But all these lessons only confirm an often manifested, and too often suppressed, instinct of our young children: their passionate love of woodland sports, their love of tree shade, of greenwood camps, of forest life in all its forms. Those who hold that “nature” is but a synonym of “habit” should witness the rapture of city children at first sight of forest glades and shady meadow brooks, and compare it with the city dread of the Swiss peasant lad or the American backwoods boy, sickened by the fumes and the uproar of a large manufacturing town. A thousands years of vice and abnormal habits have not yet silenced the voice of the physical conscience that recalls our steps to the path of Nature, and will not permit us to transgress her laws unwarned.[21]

[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The reward of nature-abiding habits is not confined to the negative advantage of escaping the discomforts of disease. In the pursuit of countless competitive avocations the Art of Survival is a chief secret of success, but in this age of sanitary abuses our lives are mostly half-told tales. Our season ends before the trees of hope have time to ripen their fruit; before their day’s work is done our toilers are overtaken by the shadows of approaching night. Sanitary reforms would undoubtedly lengthen our average term of life, and an increase of longevity alone would solve the most vexing riddles of existence: the apparent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit and compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive promises and baffled hopes of life. For millions of our fellow-men an increase of health and longevity would suffice to make life decidedly worth living. Health lessens the temptations to many vices. Perfect health blesses its possessor with a spontaneous cheerfulness almost proof against the frowns of fortune and the cares of poverty. With a meal of barley cakes and milk, a straw couch, and scant clothing of homespun linen, a shepherd-boy in the highlands of the Austrian Alps may enjoy existence to a degree that exuberates in frolic and jubilant shouts, while all the resources of wealth cannot recall the sunshine which sickness has banished from the life of the dyspeptic glutton. If happiness could be computed by measure and weight, it would be found that her richest treasures are not stored in gilded walls, but[22]in the homes of frugal thrift, of rustic vigor and nature-loving independence. The sweetness of health reflects itself in grace of form and deportment, and wins friends where the elegance of studied manners gains only admirers. Health is also a primary condition of that clearness of mind the absence of which can be only partially compensated by the light of learning. Health is the basis of mental as of bodily vigor; country-bred boys have again and again carried off the prizes of academical honors from the pupils of refined cities, and the foremost reformers of all ages and countries have been men of the people; low-born, but not the less well-born, sons of hardy rustics and mechanics, from Moses, Socrates, Epictetus, Jesus Ben Josef, and Mohammed, to Luther, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln.

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

The reward of nature-abiding habits is not confined to the negative advantage of escaping the discomforts of disease. In the pursuit of countless competitive avocations the Art of Survival is a chief secret of success, but in this age of sanitary abuses our lives are mostly half-told tales. Our season ends before the trees of hope have time to ripen their fruit; before their day’s work is done our toilers are overtaken by the shadows of approaching night. Sanitary reforms would undoubtedly lengthen our average term of life, and an increase of longevity alone would solve the most vexing riddles of existence: the apparent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit and compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive promises and baffled hopes of life. For millions of our fellow-men an increase of health and longevity would suffice to make life decidedly worth living. Health lessens the temptations to many vices. Perfect health blesses its possessor with a spontaneous cheerfulness almost proof against the frowns of fortune and the cares of poverty. With a meal of barley cakes and milk, a straw couch, and scant clothing of homespun linen, a shepherd-boy in the highlands of the Austrian Alps may enjoy existence to a degree that exuberates in frolic and jubilant shouts, while all the resources of wealth cannot recall the sunshine which sickness has banished from the life of the dyspeptic glutton. If happiness could be computed by measure and weight, it would be found that her richest treasures are not stored in gilded walls, but[22]in the homes of frugal thrift, of rustic vigor and nature-loving independence. The sweetness of health reflects itself in grace of form and deportment, and wins friends where the elegance of studied manners gains only admirers. Health is also a primary condition of that clearness of mind the absence of which can be only partially compensated by the light of learning. Health is the basis of mental as of bodily vigor; country-bred boys have again and again carried off the prizes of academical honors from the pupils of refined cities, and the foremost reformers of all ages and countries have been men of the people; low-born, but not the less well-born, sons of hardy rustics and mechanics, from Moses, Socrates, Epictetus, Jesus Ben Josef, and Mohammed, to Luther, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln.

The reward of nature-abiding habits is not confined to the negative advantage of escaping the discomforts of disease. In the pursuit of countless competitive avocations the Art of Survival is a chief secret of success, but in this age of sanitary abuses our lives are mostly half-told tales. Our season ends before the trees of hope have time to ripen their fruit; before their day’s work is done our toilers are overtaken by the shadows of approaching night. Sanitary reforms would undoubtedly lengthen our average term of life, and an increase of longevity alone would solve the most vexing riddles of existence: the apparent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit and compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive promises and baffled hopes of life. For millions of our fellow-men an increase of health and longevity would suffice to make life decidedly worth living. Health lessens the temptations to many vices. Perfect health blesses its possessor with a spontaneous cheerfulness almost proof against the frowns of fortune and the cares of poverty. With a meal of barley cakes and milk, a straw couch, and scant clothing of homespun linen, a shepherd-boy in the highlands of the Austrian Alps may enjoy existence to a degree that exuberates in frolic and jubilant shouts, while all the resources of wealth cannot recall the sunshine which sickness has banished from the life of the dyspeptic glutton. If happiness could be computed by measure and weight, it would be found that her richest treasures are not stored in gilded walls, but[22]in the homes of frugal thrift, of rustic vigor and nature-loving independence. The sweetness of health reflects itself in grace of form and deportment, and wins friends where the elegance of studied manners gains only admirers. Health is also a primary condition of that clearness of mind the absence of which can be only partially compensated by the light of learning. Health is the basis of mental as of bodily vigor; country-bred boys have again and again carried off the prizes of academical honors from the pupils of refined cities, and the foremost reformers of all ages and countries have been men of the people; low-born, but not the less well-born, sons of hardy rustics and mechanics, from Moses, Socrates, Epictetus, Jesus Ben Josef, and Mohammed, to Luther, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln.

[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.Habitual sin against the health-laws of Nature was originally chiefly a consequence of untoward circumstances. Slaves, paupers, immigrants to the inhospitable climes of the higher latitudes, were forced to adopt abnormal modes of life which, in the course of time, hardened into habits. Man, like all the varieties of his four-handed relatives, is a native of the tropics, and the diet of our earliest manlike ancestors was, in all probability,frugal: tree-fruits, berries, nuts, roots, and edible herbs and gums. But the first colonists of the winter lands were obliged to eke out an existence by eating the flesh of their fellow-creatures, and a carnivorous diet thus became the[23]habitual and, in many countries, almost the exclusive diet of the nomadic inhabitants.Alcohol is a product of fermentation, and the avarice of a cruel master may have forced his slaves to quench their thirst with fermented must or hydromel till habit begot a baneful second nature, and the at first reluctant victims of intoxication learned to preferspoiledto fresh grape-juice. Sedentary occupations, however distasteful at first, are apt to engender a sluggish aversion to physical exercise, and even habitual confinement in a vitiated atmosphere may at last become a second nature, characterized by a morbid dread of fresh air. The slaves of the Roman landowners had to pass their nights in prison-like dungeons, and may have contracted the first germ of that mental disease known as the night-air superstition, the idea, namely, that after dark the vitiated atmosphere of a stifling dormitory is preferable to the balm of the cooling night wind.In modern times an unprecedented concurrence of circumstances has stimulated a feverish haste in the pursuit of wealth, and thus indirectly led to the neglect of personal hygiene. The abolition of the public festivals by which the potentates of the pagan empires compensated their subjects for the loss of political freedom, the heartless egotism of our wealthy Pharisees, venal justice, and the dire bondage of city life all help to stimulate a headlong race toward the goal of the promised land of ease and independence—a goal reached only by a favored few compared with the multitudes who daily drop down wayworn and exhausted.[24]But the deadliest blow to the cause of health was struck by the anti-natural fanaticism of the Middle Ages, the world-hating infatuation of the maniacs who depreciated every secular blessing as a curse in disguise, and despised their own bodies as they despised nature, life, and earth. The disciples of the world-renouncing messiah actually welcomed disease as a sign of divine favor, they gloried in decrepitude and deformity, and promoted the work of degeneration with a persevering zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the human race. For a period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic history of Europe is the history of a systematic war against the interests of the human body; the “mortification of the flesh” was enjoined as a cardinal duty of a true believer; health-giving recreations were suppressed, while health-destroying vices were encouraged by the example of the clergy; domestic hygiene was utterly neglected, and the founders of some twenty-four different monastic orders vied in the invention of new penances and systematic outrages upon the health of the poor convent-slaves. Their diet was confined to the coarsest and often most loathsome food; they were subjected to weekly bleedings, to profitless hardships and deprivations; their sleep was broken night after night; fasting was carried to a length which often avenged itself in permanent insanity; and their only compensation for a daily repetition of health-destroying afflictions was the permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spirituous poisons: the same bigots who grudged their followers a night of unbroken rest or a mouthful of[25]digestible food indulged them in quantities of alcoholic beverages that would have staggered the conscience of a modern beer-swiller.The bodily health of a community was held so utterly below the attention of a Christian magistrate that every large city became a hotbed of contagious diseases; small-pox and scrofula became pandemic disorders; the pestilence of the Black Death ravaged Europe from end to end—nay, instead of trying to remove the cause of the evil, the wretched victims were advised to seek relief in prayer and self-torture, and a philosopher uttering a word of protest against such illusions would have risked to have his tongue torn out by the roots and his body consigned to the flames of the stake.Mankind has never wholly recovered from that reign of insanity. Indifference to many of the plainest health-laws of nature is still the reproach of our so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no time to expurgate the slums of their own cities; our missionary societies spend millions to acquaint the natives of distant islands with the ceremony of baptism, but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment of free public baths for the benefit of their poor neighbors, whose children are scourged or caged like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of the next river. Temperance, indeed, is preached in the name of the miracle-monger who turned water into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to drown their misery in the Lethe of intoxication are[26]deprived of every healthier pastime; the magistrates of our wealthy cities rage with penal ordinances against the abettors of public amusements on the day when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leisure for recreation. Poor factory children who would spend the holidays in the paradise of the green hills are lured into the baited trap of a Sabbath-school and bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew ghost-stories or the records of fictitious genealogies; but the offer to enlarge the educational sphere of our public schools by the introduction of a health primer would be scornfully rejected as an attempt to divert the attention of the pupils from more important topics.

C.—PERVERSION.

Habitual sin against the health-laws of Nature was originally chiefly a consequence of untoward circumstances. Slaves, paupers, immigrants to the inhospitable climes of the higher latitudes, were forced to adopt abnormal modes of life which, in the course of time, hardened into habits. Man, like all the varieties of his four-handed relatives, is a native of the tropics, and the diet of our earliest manlike ancestors was, in all probability,frugal: tree-fruits, berries, nuts, roots, and edible herbs and gums. But the first colonists of the winter lands were obliged to eke out an existence by eating the flesh of their fellow-creatures, and a carnivorous diet thus became the[23]habitual and, in many countries, almost the exclusive diet of the nomadic inhabitants.Alcohol is a product of fermentation, and the avarice of a cruel master may have forced his slaves to quench their thirst with fermented must or hydromel till habit begot a baneful second nature, and the at first reluctant victims of intoxication learned to preferspoiledto fresh grape-juice. Sedentary occupations, however distasteful at first, are apt to engender a sluggish aversion to physical exercise, and even habitual confinement in a vitiated atmosphere may at last become a second nature, characterized by a morbid dread of fresh air. The slaves of the Roman landowners had to pass their nights in prison-like dungeons, and may have contracted the first germ of that mental disease known as the night-air superstition, the idea, namely, that after dark the vitiated atmosphere of a stifling dormitory is preferable to the balm of the cooling night wind.In modern times an unprecedented concurrence of circumstances has stimulated a feverish haste in the pursuit of wealth, and thus indirectly led to the neglect of personal hygiene. The abolition of the public festivals by which the potentates of the pagan empires compensated their subjects for the loss of political freedom, the heartless egotism of our wealthy Pharisees, venal justice, and the dire bondage of city life all help to stimulate a headlong race toward the goal of the promised land of ease and independence—a goal reached only by a favored few compared with the multitudes who daily drop down wayworn and exhausted.[24]But the deadliest blow to the cause of health was struck by the anti-natural fanaticism of the Middle Ages, the world-hating infatuation of the maniacs who depreciated every secular blessing as a curse in disguise, and despised their own bodies as they despised nature, life, and earth. The disciples of the world-renouncing messiah actually welcomed disease as a sign of divine favor, they gloried in decrepitude and deformity, and promoted the work of degeneration with a persevering zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the human race. For a period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic history of Europe is the history of a systematic war against the interests of the human body; the “mortification of the flesh” was enjoined as a cardinal duty of a true believer; health-giving recreations were suppressed, while health-destroying vices were encouraged by the example of the clergy; domestic hygiene was utterly neglected, and the founders of some twenty-four different monastic orders vied in the invention of new penances and systematic outrages upon the health of the poor convent-slaves. Their diet was confined to the coarsest and often most loathsome food; they were subjected to weekly bleedings, to profitless hardships and deprivations; their sleep was broken night after night; fasting was carried to a length which often avenged itself in permanent insanity; and their only compensation for a daily repetition of health-destroying afflictions was the permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spirituous poisons: the same bigots who grudged their followers a night of unbroken rest or a mouthful of[25]digestible food indulged them in quantities of alcoholic beverages that would have staggered the conscience of a modern beer-swiller.The bodily health of a community was held so utterly below the attention of a Christian magistrate that every large city became a hotbed of contagious diseases; small-pox and scrofula became pandemic disorders; the pestilence of the Black Death ravaged Europe from end to end—nay, instead of trying to remove the cause of the evil, the wretched victims were advised to seek relief in prayer and self-torture, and a philosopher uttering a word of protest against such illusions would have risked to have his tongue torn out by the roots and his body consigned to the flames of the stake.Mankind has never wholly recovered from that reign of insanity. Indifference to many of the plainest health-laws of nature is still the reproach of our so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no time to expurgate the slums of their own cities; our missionary societies spend millions to acquaint the natives of distant islands with the ceremony of baptism, but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment of free public baths for the benefit of their poor neighbors, whose children are scourged or caged like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of the next river. Temperance, indeed, is preached in the name of the miracle-monger who turned water into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to drown their misery in the Lethe of intoxication are[26]deprived of every healthier pastime; the magistrates of our wealthy cities rage with penal ordinances against the abettors of public amusements on the day when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leisure for recreation. Poor factory children who would spend the holidays in the paradise of the green hills are lured into the baited trap of a Sabbath-school and bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew ghost-stories or the records of fictitious genealogies; but the offer to enlarge the educational sphere of our public schools by the introduction of a health primer would be scornfully rejected as an attempt to divert the attention of the pupils from more important topics.

Habitual sin against the health-laws of Nature was originally chiefly a consequence of untoward circumstances. Slaves, paupers, immigrants to the inhospitable climes of the higher latitudes, were forced to adopt abnormal modes of life which, in the course of time, hardened into habits. Man, like all the varieties of his four-handed relatives, is a native of the tropics, and the diet of our earliest manlike ancestors was, in all probability,frugal: tree-fruits, berries, nuts, roots, and edible herbs and gums. But the first colonists of the winter lands were obliged to eke out an existence by eating the flesh of their fellow-creatures, and a carnivorous diet thus became the[23]habitual and, in many countries, almost the exclusive diet of the nomadic inhabitants.

Alcohol is a product of fermentation, and the avarice of a cruel master may have forced his slaves to quench their thirst with fermented must or hydromel till habit begot a baneful second nature, and the at first reluctant victims of intoxication learned to preferspoiledto fresh grape-juice. Sedentary occupations, however distasteful at first, are apt to engender a sluggish aversion to physical exercise, and even habitual confinement in a vitiated atmosphere may at last become a second nature, characterized by a morbid dread of fresh air. The slaves of the Roman landowners had to pass their nights in prison-like dungeons, and may have contracted the first germ of that mental disease known as the night-air superstition, the idea, namely, that after dark the vitiated atmosphere of a stifling dormitory is preferable to the balm of the cooling night wind.

In modern times an unprecedented concurrence of circumstances has stimulated a feverish haste in the pursuit of wealth, and thus indirectly led to the neglect of personal hygiene. The abolition of the public festivals by which the potentates of the pagan empires compensated their subjects for the loss of political freedom, the heartless egotism of our wealthy Pharisees, venal justice, and the dire bondage of city life all help to stimulate a headlong race toward the goal of the promised land of ease and independence—a goal reached only by a favored few compared with the multitudes who daily drop down wayworn and exhausted.[24]

But the deadliest blow to the cause of health was struck by the anti-natural fanaticism of the Middle Ages, the world-hating infatuation of the maniacs who depreciated every secular blessing as a curse in disguise, and despised their own bodies as they despised nature, life, and earth. The disciples of the world-renouncing messiah actually welcomed disease as a sign of divine favor, they gloried in decrepitude and deformity, and promoted the work of degeneration with a persevering zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the human race. For a period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic history of Europe is the history of a systematic war against the interests of the human body; the “mortification of the flesh” was enjoined as a cardinal duty of a true believer; health-giving recreations were suppressed, while health-destroying vices were encouraged by the example of the clergy; domestic hygiene was utterly neglected, and the founders of some twenty-four different monastic orders vied in the invention of new penances and systematic outrages upon the health of the poor convent-slaves. Their diet was confined to the coarsest and often most loathsome food; they were subjected to weekly bleedings, to profitless hardships and deprivations; their sleep was broken night after night; fasting was carried to a length which often avenged itself in permanent insanity; and their only compensation for a daily repetition of health-destroying afflictions was the permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spirituous poisons: the same bigots who grudged their followers a night of unbroken rest or a mouthful of[25]digestible food indulged them in quantities of alcoholic beverages that would have staggered the conscience of a modern beer-swiller.

The bodily health of a community was held so utterly below the attention of a Christian magistrate that every large city became a hotbed of contagious diseases; small-pox and scrofula became pandemic disorders; the pestilence of the Black Death ravaged Europe from end to end—nay, instead of trying to remove the cause of the evil, the wretched victims were advised to seek relief in prayer and self-torture, and a philosopher uttering a word of protest against such illusions would have risked to have his tongue torn out by the roots and his body consigned to the flames of the stake.

Mankind has never wholly recovered from that reign of insanity. Indifference to many of the plainest health-laws of nature is still the reproach of our so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no time to expurgate the slums of their own cities; our missionary societies spend millions to acquaint the natives of distant islands with the ceremony of baptism, but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment of free public baths for the benefit of their poor neighbors, whose children are scourged or caged like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of the next river. Temperance, indeed, is preached in the name of the miracle-monger who turned water into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to drown their misery in the Lethe of intoxication are[26]deprived of every healthier pastime; the magistrates of our wealthy cities rage with penal ordinances against the abettors of public amusements on the day when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leisure for recreation. Poor factory children who would spend the holidays in the paradise of the green hills are lured into the baited trap of a Sabbath-school and bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew ghost-stories or the records of fictitious genealogies; but the offer to enlarge the educational sphere of our public schools by the introduction of a health primer would be scornfully rejected as an attempt to divert the attention of the pupils from more important topics.

[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.But the laws of Nature cannot be outraged with impunity, and the aid of supernatural agencies has never yet protected our ghost-mongers from the consequences of their sins against the monitions of their physical conscience. The neglect of cleanliness avenges itself in diseases which no prayer can avert; during the most filthful and prayerful period of the Middle Ages, seven out of ten city-dwellers were subject to scrofula of that especially malignant form that attacks the glands and the arteries as well as the skin. Medical nostrums and clerical hocus-pocus of the ordinary sort were, indeed, so notoriously unavailing against that virulent affection that thousands of sufferers took long journeys to try the efficacy of aking’stouch, as recorded by the unanimous testimony of contemporary writers, as well as in the still[27]current term of asovereignremedy. A long foot-journey, with its opportunities for physical exercise, outdoor camps, and changes of diet, often really effected the desired result; but, on their return to their reeking hovels, the convalescents experienced a speedy relapse, and had either to repeat the wearisome journey or resign themselves to the “mysterious dispensation” of a Providence which obstinately refused to let miracles interfere with the normal operation of the physiological laws recorded in the protests of instinct. Stench, nausea, and sick-headaches might, indeed, have enforced those protests upon the attention of the sufferers; but the disciples of Antinaturalism had been taught to mistrust the promptings of their natural desires, and to accept discomforts as signs of divine favor, or, in extreme cases, to trust their abatement to the intercession of the saints, rather than to the profane interference of secular science.The dungeon-life of the monastic maniacs, and the abject submission to the nuisance of atmospheric impurities, avenged themselves in the ravages of pulmonary consumption; the votaries of dungeon-smells were taught the value of fresh air by the tortures of an affliction from which only the removal of the cause could deliver a victim, and millions of orthodox citizens died scores of years before the attainment of a life-term which a seemingly inscrutable dispensation of Heaven grants to the unbelieving savages of the wilderness. The cheapest of all remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable abundance, craving admission and offering them the[28]aid which Nature grants even to the lowliest of her creatures, but a son of a miracle-working church had no concern with such things, and was enjoined to rely on the efficacy of mystic ceremonies: “If any man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” “And the prayer of faith shall cure the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”Thousands of the fatuous bigots who prayed for “meekness of spirit” continued to gorge themselves with the food of carnivorous animals, and thus inflamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorseless propensities of those brutes. Luigi Cornaro, the Italian reformer, assures us that it was no uncommon thing for a nobleman or prelate of his century to swallow fourteen pounds of strong meats at a single meal, and that, after invoking the blessing of Heaven upon such a repast, the devourer of meat-pies would rise with his paunch distended “like the hide of a drowned dog.” The “Love of Enemies,” “forgiveness and meekness,” were on their lips; but those fourteen pounds of meat-pie worked out their normal result; and among the carnivorous saints of that age we accordingly find men whose fiendish inhumanity would have appalled the roughest legionary of pagan Rome. Cæsar Borgia, the son of a highest ecclesiastic dignitary, a disciple of a priestly training-school, and himself a prince of the church, seems to have combined the stealthy cunning of a viper with the bloodthirst of a hyena. Four times he made and broke the most solemn treaties,[29]in order to get an opportunity to invade the territory of an unprepared neighbor. His campaigns were conducted with a truculence denounced even by his own allies; with his own hand he poisoned fourteen of his boon companions, in order to possess himself of their property; twenty-three of his political and clerical rivals were removed by the dagger of hired assassins or executed upon the testimony of suborned perjurers. He tried to poison his brother-in-law, Prince Alphonso of Aragon, in order to facilitate his design of seducing his own sister; he made repeated, and at last partly successful, attempts to poison the brother of his mother and his own father, the pope.The heartless neglect of sanitary provisions for the comfort of the poor avenges itself in epidemics that visit the abodes of wealth as well as the hovels of misery. A stall-fed preacher of our southern seaport towns may circulate a petition for the suppression of Sunday excursions, in order to prevent the recreation-needing toilers of his community from leaving town on St. Collection Day; he may advocate the arrest of bathing schoolboys, in order to suppress an undue love of physical enjoyments, or to gratify a female tithe-payer who seeks an opportunity of displaying her prudish virtue at the expense of the helpless; he may vote to suppress outdoor sports in the cool of the late evening, when the inhabitants of the tenement streets are trying to enjoy an hour of extra Sabbatarian recreation—a privilege to be reserved for the saints who can rest six days out of seven, and on the seventh harvest the fruits of other men’s labor. But epidemics refuse to recognize such distinctions,[30]and the vomit of yellow fever will force the most reverend monopolist to disgorge the proceeds of the tithes coined from the misery of consumptive factory children. Nor can wealth purchase immunity from the natural consequences of habitual vice. The dyspeptic glutton is a Tantalus who starves in the midst of abundance. The worn-out tradesman, whose restless toil in the mines of mammon has led to asthma or consumption, would vainly offer to barter half his gold for half a year of health. Thousands of families who deny themselves every recreation, who linger out the summer in the sweltering city, and toil and save “for the sake of our dear children,” have received Nature’s verdict on the wisdom of their course in the premature death of those children.

D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

But the laws of Nature cannot be outraged with impunity, and the aid of supernatural agencies has never yet protected our ghost-mongers from the consequences of their sins against the monitions of their physical conscience. The neglect of cleanliness avenges itself in diseases which no prayer can avert; during the most filthful and prayerful period of the Middle Ages, seven out of ten city-dwellers were subject to scrofula of that especially malignant form that attacks the glands and the arteries as well as the skin. Medical nostrums and clerical hocus-pocus of the ordinary sort were, indeed, so notoriously unavailing against that virulent affection that thousands of sufferers took long journeys to try the efficacy of aking’stouch, as recorded by the unanimous testimony of contemporary writers, as well as in the still[27]current term of asovereignremedy. A long foot-journey, with its opportunities for physical exercise, outdoor camps, and changes of diet, often really effected the desired result; but, on their return to their reeking hovels, the convalescents experienced a speedy relapse, and had either to repeat the wearisome journey or resign themselves to the “mysterious dispensation” of a Providence which obstinately refused to let miracles interfere with the normal operation of the physiological laws recorded in the protests of instinct. Stench, nausea, and sick-headaches might, indeed, have enforced those protests upon the attention of the sufferers; but the disciples of Antinaturalism had been taught to mistrust the promptings of their natural desires, and to accept discomforts as signs of divine favor, or, in extreme cases, to trust their abatement to the intercession of the saints, rather than to the profane interference of secular science.The dungeon-life of the monastic maniacs, and the abject submission to the nuisance of atmospheric impurities, avenged themselves in the ravages of pulmonary consumption; the votaries of dungeon-smells were taught the value of fresh air by the tortures of an affliction from which only the removal of the cause could deliver a victim, and millions of orthodox citizens died scores of years before the attainment of a life-term which a seemingly inscrutable dispensation of Heaven grants to the unbelieving savages of the wilderness. The cheapest of all remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable abundance, craving admission and offering them the[28]aid which Nature grants even to the lowliest of her creatures, but a son of a miracle-working church had no concern with such things, and was enjoined to rely on the efficacy of mystic ceremonies: “If any man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” “And the prayer of faith shall cure the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”Thousands of the fatuous bigots who prayed for “meekness of spirit” continued to gorge themselves with the food of carnivorous animals, and thus inflamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorseless propensities of those brutes. Luigi Cornaro, the Italian reformer, assures us that it was no uncommon thing for a nobleman or prelate of his century to swallow fourteen pounds of strong meats at a single meal, and that, after invoking the blessing of Heaven upon such a repast, the devourer of meat-pies would rise with his paunch distended “like the hide of a drowned dog.” The “Love of Enemies,” “forgiveness and meekness,” were on their lips; but those fourteen pounds of meat-pie worked out their normal result; and among the carnivorous saints of that age we accordingly find men whose fiendish inhumanity would have appalled the roughest legionary of pagan Rome. Cæsar Borgia, the son of a highest ecclesiastic dignitary, a disciple of a priestly training-school, and himself a prince of the church, seems to have combined the stealthy cunning of a viper with the bloodthirst of a hyena. Four times he made and broke the most solemn treaties,[29]in order to get an opportunity to invade the territory of an unprepared neighbor. His campaigns were conducted with a truculence denounced even by his own allies; with his own hand he poisoned fourteen of his boon companions, in order to possess himself of their property; twenty-three of his political and clerical rivals were removed by the dagger of hired assassins or executed upon the testimony of suborned perjurers. He tried to poison his brother-in-law, Prince Alphonso of Aragon, in order to facilitate his design of seducing his own sister; he made repeated, and at last partly successful, attempts to poison the brother of his mother and his own father, the pope.The heartless neglect of sanitary provisions for the comfort of the poor avenges itself in epidemics that visit the abodes of wealth as well as the hovels of misery. A stall-fed preacher of our southern seaport towns may circulate a petition for the suppression of Sunday excursions, in order to prevent the recreation-needing toilers of his community from leaving town on St. Collection Day; he may advocate the arrest of bathing schoolboys, in order to suppress an undue love of physical enjoyments, or to gratify a female tithe-payer who seeks an opportunity of displaying her prudish virtue at the expense of the helpless; he may vote to suppress outdoor sports in the cool of the late evening, when the inhabitants of the tenement streets are trying to enjoy an hour of extra Sabbatarian recreation—a privilege to be reserved for the saints who can rest six days out of seven, and on the seventh harvest the fruits of other men’s labor. But epidemics refuse to recognize such distinctions,[30]and the vomit of yellow fever will force the most reverend monopolist to disgorge the proceeds of the tithes coined from the misery of consumptive factory children. Nor can wealth purchase immunity from the natural consequences of habitual vice. The dyspeptic glutton is a Tantalus who starves in the midst of abundance. The worn-out tradesman, whose restless toil in the mines of mammon has led to asthma or consumption, would vainly offer to barter half his gold for half a year of health. Thousands of families who deny themselves every recreation, who linger out the summer in the sweltering city, and toil and save “for the sake of our dear children,” have received Nature’s verdict on the wisdom of their course in the premature death of those children.

But the laws of Nature cannot be outraged with impunity, and the aid of supernatural agencies has never yet protected our ghost-mongers from the consequences of their sins against the monitions of their physical conscience. The neglect of cleanliness avenges itself in diseases which no prayer can avert; during the most filthful and prayerful period of the Middle Ages, seven out of ten city-dwellers were subject to scrofula of that especially malignant form that attacks the glands and the arteries as well as the skin. Medical nostrums and clerical hocus-pocus of the ordinary sort were, indeed, so notoriously unavailing against that virulent affection that thousands of sufferers took long journeys to try the efficacy of aking’stouch, as recorded by the unanimous testimony of contemporary writers, as well as in the still[27]current term of asovereignremedy. A long foot-journey, with its opportunities for physical exercise, outdoor camps, and changes of diet, often really effected the desired result; but, on their return to their reeking hovels, the convalescents experienced a speedy relapse, and had either to repeat the wearisome journey or resign themselves to the “mysterious dispensation” of a Providence which obstinately refused to let miracles interfere with the normal operation of the physiological laws recorded in the protests of instinct. Stench, nausea, and sick-headaches might, indeed, have enforced those protests upon the attention of the sufferers; but the disciples of Antinaturalism had been taught to mistrust the promptings of their natural desires, and to accept discomforts as signs of divine favor, or, in extreme cases, to trust their abatement to the intercession of the saints, rather than to the profane interference of secular science.

The dungeon-life of the monastic maniacs, and the abject submission to the nuisance of atmospheric impurities, avenged themselves in the ravages of pulmonary consumption; the votaries of dungeon-smells were taught the value of fresh air by the tortures of an affliction from which only the removal of the cause could deliver a victim, and millions of orthodox citizens died scores of years before the attainment of a life-term which a seemingly inscrutable dispensation of Heaven grants to the unbelieving savages of the wilderness. The cheapest of all remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable abundance, craving admission and offering them the[28]aid which Nature grants even to the lowliest of her creatures, but a son of a miracle-working church had no concern with such things, and was enjoined to rely on the efficacy of mystic ceremonies: “If any man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” “And the prayer of faith shall cure the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”

Thousands of the fatuous bigots who prayed for “meekness of spirit” continued to gorge themselves with the food of carnivorous animals, and thus inflamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorseless propensities of those brutes. Luigi Cornaro, the Italian reformer, assures us that it was no uncommon thing for a nobleman or prelate of his century to swallow fourteen pounds of strong meats at a single meal, and that, after invoking the blessing of Heaven upon such a repast, the devourer of meat-pies would rise with his paunch distended “like the hide of a drowned dog.” The “Love of Enemies,” “forgiveness and meekness,” were on their lips; but those fourteen pounds of meat-pie worked out their normal result; and among the carnivorous saints of that age we accordingly find men whose fiendish inhumanity would have appalled the roughest legionary of pagan Rome. Cæsar Borgia, the son of a highest ecclesiastic dignitary, a disciple of a priestly training-school, and himself a prince of the church, seems to have combined the stealthy cunning of a viper with the bloodthirst of a hyena. Four times he made and broke the most solemn treaties,[29]in order to get an opportunity to invade the territory of an unprepared neighbor. His campaigns were conducted with a truculence denounced even by his own allies; with his own hand he poisoned fourteen of his boon companions, in order to possess himself of their property; twenty-three of his political and clerical rivals were removed by the dagger of hired assassins or executed upon the testimony of suborned perjurers. He tried to poison his brother-in-law, Prince Alphonso of Aragon, in order to facilitate his design of seducing his own sister; he made repeated, and at last partly successful, attempts to poison the brother of his mother and his own father, the pope.

The heartless neglect of sanitary provisions for the comfort of the poor avenges itself in epidemics that visit the abodes of wealth as well as the hovels of misery. A stall-fed preacher of our southern seaport towns may circulate a petition for the suppression of Sunday excursions, in order to prevent the recreation-needing toilers of his community from leaving town on St. Collection Day; he may advocate the arrest of bathing schoolboys, in order to suppress an undue love of physical enjoyments, or to gratify a female tithe-payer who seeks an opportunity of displaying her prudish virtue at the expense of the helpless; he may vote to suppress outdoor sports in the cool of the late evening, when the inhabitants of the tenement streets are trying to enjoy an hour of extra Sabbatarian recreation—a privilege to be reserved for the saints who can rest six days out of seven, and on the seventh harvest the fruits of other men’s labor. But epidemics refuse to recognize such distinctions,[30]and the vomit of yellow fever will force the most reverend monopolist to disgorge the proceeds of the tithes coined from the misery of consumptive factory children. Nor can wealth purchase immunity from the natural consequences of habitual vice. The dyspeptic glutton is a Tantalus who starves in the midst of abundance. The worn-out tradesman, whose restless toil in the mines of mammon has led to asthma or consumption, would vainly offer to barter half his gold for half a year of health. Thousands of families who deny themselves every recreation, who linger out the summer in the sweltering city, and toil and save “for the sake of our dear children,” have received Nature’s verdict on the wisdom of their course in the premature death of those children.

[Contents]E.—REDEMPTION.It has often been said that the physical regeneration of the human race could be achieved without the aid of a miracle, if its systematic pursuit were followed with half the zeal which our stock-breeders bestow upon the rearing of their cows and horses. A general observance of the most clearly recognized laws of health would, indeed, abundantly suffice for that purpose. There is, for instance, no doubt that the morbid tendency of our indoor modes of occupation could be counteracted by gymnastics, and the trustees of our education fund should build a gymnasium near every town school. As a condition of health, pure air is as essential as pure water and food, and no house-owner should be permitted to sow[31]the seeds of deadly diseases by crowding his tenants into the back rooms of unaired and unairable slum-prisons. New cities should be projected on the plan of concentric rings of cottage suburbs (interspersed with parks and gardens), instead of successive strata of tenement flats.In every large town all friends of humanity should unite for the enforcement of Sunday freedom, and spare no pains to brand the Sabbath bigots as enemies of the human race. We should found Sunday gardens, where our toil-worn fellow-citizens could enjoy their holidays with outdoor sports and outdoor dances, free museums, temperance drinks, healthy refreshments, collections of botanical and zoölogical curiosities. Country excursions on the only leisure day of the laboring classes should be as free as air and sunshine, and every civilized community should have a Recreation League for the promotion of thatpurpose.In the second century of our chronological era the cities of the Roman empire vied in the establishment of free public baths. Antioch alone had fourteen of them; Alexandria not less than twelve, and Rome itself at least twenty, some of them of such magnificence and extent that their foundations have withstood the ravages of sixteen centuries. Many of those establishments were entirely free, and even theThermæ, or luxurious Warm Baths, of Caracalla admitted visitors for a gate-fee which all but the poorest could afford. Our boasted civilization will have to follow such examples before it can begin to deserve its name; and even the free circus games[32](by no means confined to the combats of armed prize-fighters) were preferable to the fanatical suppression of all popular sports which made the age of Puritanism the dreariest period of that dismal era known as the Reign of the Cross.The preservation of health is at least not less important than the preservation of Hebrew mythology; and communities who force their children to sacrifice a large portion of their time to the study of Asiatic miracle legends might well permit them to devote an occasional hour or two to the study of modern physiology. We should have health primers and teachers of hygiene, and the most primitive district school should find time for a few weekly lessons in the rudiments of sanitary science, such as the importance of ventilation, the best modes of exercise, the proper quality and quantity of our daily food, the significance of the stimulant habit, the use and abuse of dress, etc.Such text-books would prepare the way for health lectures, for health legislation and the reform of municipal hygiene. The untruth that “a man can not be defiled by things entering him from without” has been thoroughly exploded by the lessons of science, and should no longer excuse the neglect of thatfrugalitywhich in the times of the pagan republics formed the best safeguard of national vigor. Milk, bread, and fruit, instead of greasy viands, alcohol, and narcotic drinks, would soon modify the mortality statistics of our large cities, and we should not hesitate to recognize the truth that the remarkable[33]longevity of the Jews and Mohammedans has a great deal to do with their dread of impure food.

E.—REDEMPTION.

It has often been said that the physical regeneration of the human race could be achieved without the aid of a miracle, if its systematic pursuit were followed with half the zeal which our stock-breeders bestow upon the rearing of their cows and horses. A general observance of the most clearly recognized laws of health would, indeed, abundantly suffice for that purpose. There is, for instance, no doubt that the morbid tendency of our indoor modes of occupation could be counteracted by gymnastics, and the trustees of our education fund should build a gymnasium near every town school. As a condition of health, pure air is as essential as pure water and food, and no house-owner should be permitted to sow[31]the seeds of deadly diseases by crowding his tenants into the back rooms of unaired and unairable slum-prisons. New cities should be projected on the plan of concentric rings of cottage suburbs (interspersed with parks and gardens), instead of successive strata of tenement flats.In every large town all friends of humanity should unite for the enforcement of Sunday freedom, and spare no pains to brand the Sabbath bigots as enemies of the human race. We should found Sunday gardens, where our toil-worn fellow-citizens could enjoy their holidays with outdoor sports and outdoor dances, free museums, temperance drinks, healthy refreshments, collections of botanical and zoölogical curiosities. Country excursions on the only leisure day of the laboring classes should be as free as air and sunshine, and every civilized community should have a Recreation League for the promotion of thatpurpose.In the second century of our chronological era the cities of the Roman empire vied in the establishment of free public baths. Antioch alone had fourteen of them; Alexandria not less than twelve, and Rome itself at least twenty, some of them of such magnificence and extent that their foundations have withstood the ravages of sixteen centuries. Many of those establishments were entirely free, and even theThermæ, or luxurious Warm Baths, of Caracalla admitted visitors for a gate-fee which all but the poorest could afford. Our boasted civilization will have to follow such examples before it can begin to deserve its name; and even the free circus games[32](by no means confined to the combats of armed prize-fighters) were preferable to the fanatical suppression of all popular sports which made the age of Puritanism the dreariest period of that dismal era known as the Reign of the Cross.The preservation of health is at least not less important than the preservation of Hebrew mythology; and communities who force their children to sacrifice a large portion of their time to the study of Asiatic miracle legends might well permit them to devote an occasional hour or two to the study of modern physiology. We should have health primers and teachers of hygiene, and the most primitive district school should find time for a few weekly lessons in the rudiments of sanitary science, such as the importance of ventilation, the best modes of exercise, the proper quality and quantity of our daily food, the significance of the stimulant habit, the use and abuse of dress, etc.Such text-books would prepare the way for health lectures, for health legislation and the reform of municipal hygiene. The untruth that “a man can not be defiled by things entering him from without” has been thoroughly exploded by the lessons of science, and should no longer excuse the neglect of thatfrugalitywhich in the times of the pagan republics formed the best safeguard of national vigor. Milk, bread, and fruit, instead of greasy viands, alcohol, and narcotic drinks, would soon modify the mortality statistics of our large cities, and we should not hesitate to recognize the truth that the remarkable[33]longevity of the Jews and Mohammedans has a great deal to do with their dread of impure food.

It has often been said that the physical regeneration of the human race could be achieved without the aid of a miracle, if its systematic pursuit were followed with half the zeal which our stock-breeders bestow upon the rearing of their cows and horses. A general observance of the most clearly recognized laws of health would, indeed, abundantly suffice for that purpose. There is, for instance, no doubt that the morbid tendency of our indoor modes of occupation could be counteracted by gymnastics, and the trustees of our education fund should build a gymnasium near every town school. As a condition of health, pure air is as essential as pure water and food, and no house-owner should be permitted to sow[31]the seeds of deadly diseases by crowding his tenants into the back rooms of unaired and unairable slum-prisons. New cities should be projected on the plan of concentric rings of cottage suburbs (interspersed with parks and gardens), instead of successive strata of tenement flats.

In every large town all friends of humanity should unite for the enforcement of Sunday freedom, and spare no pains to brand the Sabbath bigots as enemies of the human race. We should found Sunday gardens, where our toil-worn fellow-citizens could enjoy their holidays with outdoor sports and outdoor dances, free museums, temperance drinks, healthy refreshments, collections of botanical and zoölogical curiosities. Country excursions on the only leisure day of the laboring classes should be as free as air and sunshine, and every civilized community should have a Recreation League for the promotion of thatpurpose.

In the second century of our chronological era the cities of the Roman empire vied in the establishment of free public baths. Antioch alone had fourteen of them; Alexandria not less than twelve, and Rome itself at least twenty, some of them of such magnificence and extent that their foundations have withstood the ravages of sixteen centuries. Many of those establishments were entirely free, and even theThermæ, or luxurious Warm Baths, of Caracalla admitted visitors for a gate-fee which all but the poorest could afford. Our boasted civilization will have to follow such examples before it can begin to deserve its name; and even the free circus games[32](by no means confined to the combats of armed prize-fighters) were preferable to the fanatical suppression of all popular sports which made the age of Puritanism the dreariest period of that dismal era known as the Reign of the Cross.

The preservation of health is at least not less important than the preservation of Hebrew mythology; and communities who force their children to sacrifice a large portion of their time to the study of Asiatic miracle legends might well permit them to devote an occasional hour or two to the study of modern physiology. We should have health primers and teachers of hygiene, and the most primitive district school should find time for a few weekly lessons in the rudiments of sanitary science, such as the importance of ventilation, the best modes of exercise, the proper quality and quantity of our daily food, the significance of the stimulant habit, the use and abuse of dress, etc.

Such text-books would prepare the way for health lectures, for health legislation and the reform of municipal hygiene. The untruth that “a man can not be defiled by things entering him from without” has been thoroughly exploded by the lessons of science, and should no longer excuse the neglect of thatfrugalitywhich in the times of the pagan republics formed the best safeguard of national vigor. Milk, bread, and fruit, instead of greasy viands, alcohol, and narcotic drinks, would soon modify the mortality statistics of our large cities, and we should not hesitate to recognize the truth that the remarkable[33]longevity of the Jews and Mohammedans has a great deal to do with their dread of impure food.

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