(Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon the system of stimulants and narcotics.)
(Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon the system of stimulants and narcotics.)
A few years ago there died an old gentleman who had devoted some twenty years of his life to teaching people to chew their food. Horace Fletcher was his name, and his ideas became a fad, and some people carried them to comical extremes. But Fletcher made a real discovery; what he called "the food filter." This is the automatic action of the swallowing apparatus, whereby nature selects the food which has been sufficiently prepared for digestion. If you chew a mouthful of food without ever performing the act of swallowing, you will find that the food gradually disappears. What happens is that all of it which has been reduced to a thin paste will slip unnoticed down your throat, and you may go on putting more food into your mouth, and chewing, and can eat a whole meal without ever performing the act of swallowing. Fletcher claimed that this is the proper way to eat, and that you can train yourself to follow this method. I have tried his idea and adopted it. One of my diet rules, to which there is no exception, is that if I haven't the time to chew my food properly, I haven't the time to eat; I skip that meal.
The habit of bolting food is a source of disease. To be sure, the carnivorous animals bolt their food, but they are tougher than we are, and do not carry the burden of a large brain and a complex nervous system. If you swallow your meals half chewed, and wash them down with liquids, you may get away with it for a while, but some day you will pay for it with dyspepsia and nervous troubles. And the same thing applies to your habit of jumping up from meals and rushing away to work, whether it be work of the muscles, or of brain and nerves. Proper digestion requires the presence of a quantity of blood in the walls of the stomach and digestive tract. It requires the attention of your subconscious mind, and this means rest of muscles and brain centers.If you cannot rest for an hour after meals, omit that meal, or make it a light one, of fruit juices, which are almost immediately absorbed by the stomach, and of salads, which do not ferment. You may rest assured that it will not hurt you to skip a meal, and make up for it when you have time to be quiet. I have been many times in my life under very intense and long continued nervous strain; for example, during the Colorado coal strike, I led a public demonstration which kept me in a state of excitement all the day and a good part of the night several weeks. During this period I ate almost nothing; a baked apple and a cup of custard would be as near as I would go to a meal, and as a result I came through the experience without any injury whatever to my health. I lost perhaps ten pounds in weight, but that was quickly made up when I settled back to a normal way of life.
I have been on camping trips when I had a great deal of hard work to do, carrying a canoe long distances on my back, or paddling it forty miles a day. On the mornings of such a trip I have seen a guide cook himself an elaborate breakfast of freshly baked bread, bacon, and even beans, and make a hearty meal and then go straight to work. My meal, on the contrary, would consist of a small dish of stewed prunes, or perhaps some huckleberries or raspberries, if they could be found. I will not say that I could do as much as the guide, because he was used to it, and I was not. But I can say this—if I had eaten his breakfast at the start of the day, I would have been dead before night; and I mean the word "dead" quite literally. I know a man who started to climb Whiteface mountain in the Adirondacks. He climbed half way, and then ate lunch, which consisted of nine hard boiled eggs. Then he started to climb the rest of the mountain, and dropped dead of acute indigestion.
There are few poisons which can affect the system more quickly, or more dangerously, than a mass of food which is not digested. The stomach is an ideal forcing-house for the breeding of bacteria. It provides warmth and moisture, and you, in your meal, provide the bacteria and the material upon which they thrive. Under normal conditions, the stomach pours out a gastric juice which kills the bacteria; but let this gastric juice for any reason be lacking—because your nervous energy has gone somewhere else, or because yourblood-stream, from which the gastric juice must be made, has been drawn away to the muscles by hard labor; then you have a yeast-pot, with great quantities of gases and poisons. In acute cases the results are evident enough: violent pains and convulsions, followed by coma and the turning black of the body. But what you should understand is that you may produce a milder case of such poisoning, and may do it day after day habitually, and little by little your vital organs will be weakened by the strain.
It does not make any difference at what hour of the twenty-four you take the great bulk of your food. It is one of the commonest delusions that you get some strengthening effect from your food immediately, and must have this strength in order to do hard work. To be sure, there are substances, such as grape-sugar, which require practically no digesting; you can hold them in the mouth, and they will be digested by the saliva, and absorbed at once into the blood-stream. But unless you have been starved for a long period you do not need to get your strength in this rush fashion. If you ate your normal meals on the previous day, your blood-stream is fully supplied with nutriment which has been put through a long process of preparation, and you can get up in the morning and work all day, if necessary, upon what is already in your system. To be sure, you may feel hungry, and even faint, but that is merely a matter of habit; your system is accustomed to taking food and expects it. But if you are a laborer doing hard work, you can easily train yourself to eat a light meal in the morning, and another light meal at noon, and to eat a hearty meal when your work is done and you can rest. Two light meals and a hearty meal are all that any system needs, and you can prove it to yourself by trying it, and watching your weight once a week.
I have tried many experiments, and the conclusion to which I have come is that there is no virtue in any particular meal-hours or any particular number of meals. For several years I tried the experiment of two meals a day. I was living a retired life, and had little contact with the world, and I would make a hearty meal at ten o'clock in the morning, and another at five in the afternoon. But later on I found that inconvenient, and now I take a light breakfast, and two moderate-sized meals at the conventional hours of lunch and dinner. I can arrange my own time, so after meal times iswhen I get my reading done. Sometimes, when I am tired, I feel sleepy after meals, but I have learned not to yield to this impulse. I do not know how to explain this; I have observed that animals sleep after eating, and it appears to be a natural thing to do; but I know that if I go to sleep after a meal, nature makes clear to me that I have made a mistake, and I do not repeat it. I never eat at night, and always go to bed on an empty stomach, so I am always hungry when I open my eyes in the morning. I never know what it is not to be hungry at meal times, and my habits are so regular that I could set my watch by my stomach.
Another common habit which is harmful is eating between meals. I have known people who are accustomed to nibble at food nearly all the time. Shelley records that he tried it as an experiment, thinking it might be a convenient way to get digestion done—but he found that it did not work. The stomach is apparently meant to work in pulses; to do a job of digesting, and then to rest and accumulate the juices for another job. It will accustom itself to a certain régime, and will work accordingly, but if, when it has half digested a load of food, you pile more food in on top, you make as much trouble as you would make in your kitchen if you required your cook to prepare another meal before she has cleaned up after the last one. Three times a day is enough for any adult to eat. Children require to eat oftener, because their bodies are more active, and they not merely have to keep up weight, but to add to it. The simplest way to arrange matters with children is to give them three good meals at the hours when adults eat, and then to give them a couple of pieces of fruit between breakfast and lunch, and again between lunch and supper. I have never seen a child who would not be satisfied with this, when once the habit was established.
I have already spoken of the cooking and serving of food. I consider that the "gastronomic art," as it is pompously called, is ninety-nine per cent plain rubbish. To be sure, if foods are appetizingly prepared, and look good and smell good and taste good, they will cause the gastric juices to flow abundantly, as the Russian scientist Pavlov has demonstrated by practical experiment with the stomach-pump. But I know without any stomach-pump that the best thing to make my gastric juices flow is hard work and a spare diet. When Icome home from five sets of tennis, and have a cold shower and a rub-down, my gastric juices will flow for a piece of cold beefsteak and a cold sweet potato, quite as well as for anything that is served by a leisure class "chef." Needless to say, I want food to be fresh, and I want it to be clean, but I have other things to do with my time and money than to pamper my appetites and encourage food whims.
If you have a grandmother, or ever had one, you know what grandmothers tell you about "hot nourishing food"; but I have tried the experiment, and satisfied myself that there is absolutely no difference in nourishing qualities between hot food and cold food. If you chew your food sufficiently, it will all be ninety-eight and six-tenths degree food when it gets to your stomach, and that is the way your stomach wants it. Of course, if you have been out in a blizzard, and are chilled, and want to restore the body temperature, a hot drink will be one of the quickest ways, and if the emergency is extreme, you may even add a stimulant. On the other hand, if you are suffering from heat, it is sensible to cool your body by a cold drink. But you should use as much judgment with yourself as you would with a horse, which you do not permit to drink a lot of cold water when he is heated up, and is going into his stall to stand still.
I have mentioned the word "stimulants," and this opens a large subject. There are drugs which affect the body in two different ways: some excite the nerves, and through the nerves the heart and blood-stream, to more intense activity; others have the effect of deadening the nerves, and dulling the sense of exhaustion and pain. One of these groups is called stimulants, and the other is called narcotics; but as a matter of fact the stimulants are really narcotics, because they operate by dulling the nerves whose function it is to prevent the over-accumulation of fatigue poisons; in other words, they keep the nerves and muscles from knowing that they are tired, and so they go on working.
It is possible, of course, to conceive of an emergency in which that is necessary. Once upon a time, on a hunting trip, I had been traveling all day, and was caught in a rain storm, and exhausted and chilled to the bone; I had to make camp without a fire, so when I got the tent up I wrapped myself in blankets and drank a couple of tablespoons full of whiskey. That is the only time I have ever taken whiskey in my life,and it warmed me almost instantly, and did me no harm. In the same way there were two or three occasions when I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and could not sleep, and let the doctor give me a sleeping powder. But in each case I knew that I was fooling with a dangerous habit, and I did no more fooling than necessary. No one should make use of either stimulants or narcotics except in extreme emergency, and never but a few times in a lifetime. What you should do is to change your habits so that you will not need to over-strain.
All these drugs are habit forming; that is to say, they leave the body no better, and with a craving for a repetition of the relief. When you are tired, it is because your muscles and nerves are storing up fatigue poisons more rapidly than your blood-stream can get rid of them. You need to know about this condition, and exhaustion and pain are nature's protective warning. If you put a stop to the warning, you are as unintelligent as the Eastern despots who used to cut off the head of the messenger who brought bad tidings. If, when you have a headache, you go into a drug store and let the druggist mix you one of those white fizzy drinks, what you are doing is not to get rid of the poisons in your blood-stream, but merely to reduce the action of your heart, so as to keep the blood from pressing so fast into the aching blood vessels and nerves. You may try that trick with your heart a number of times, but sooner or later you will try it once too often—your heart will stop a little bit quicker than you meant it to!
Drugs are poisons, and their action depends upon their poisoning some particular portion of the body, and temporarily paralyzing it. And bear this in mind, they are none the less poisonous because they are "natural" products. You can kill yourself by cyanide of potassium, which comes out of a chemist's retort; but you can kill yourself just as dead with laudanum, which comes out of a plant, or with the contents of the venom sac of a snake. You are poisoning yourself none the less certainly if you use alcohol, which is made from the juices of beautiful fruits, and has had hosts of famous poets writing songs about it; or you can poison yourself with the caffein which you get in a lovely brown bean which comes from Brazil, fragrant to the nostrils and delicious to the taste. You may drink wine and tea and coffeefor a hundred years, and have your picture published in the newspapers as a proof that these habits conduce to health; but nothing will be said about the large number of people who practiced these habits, and didn't live so long, and about how long they might have lived if they hadn't practiced these habits.
I was brought up in the South, and my "elders" belonged to a generation which had grown up in war time. For this reason many of the men both drank and smoked to excess, and in my boyhood I lived among them and watched them, and with the help of advice from a wise mother, I conceived a horror of every kind of stimulant. The alcoholic poets could not fool me; I had been in the alcoholic wards of the hospitals. I had seen one man after another, beautiful and kindly and gracious men, dragged down into a pit of torment and shame.
Alcohol is, I think, the greatest trap that nature ever set for the feet of the human race. It is responsible for more degradation and misery than any other evil in the world; and I say this, knowing well that my Socialist friends will cry, "What about Capitalism?" My answer is that I doubt if there ever would have been any Capitalism in the world, if it had not been for alcohol. If the workers had not been systematically poisoned, and all their savings taken from them by the gin-mill, they would never have submitted to the capitalist system, they would have built the co-operative commonwealth at the time they were building the first factories. I listen to the arguments of my radical friends about "personal liberty," but I note that in Russia, when it was a question of making a practical revolution and keeping it alive, the first thing the leaders did was to drag out the contents of the wine-cellars of the palaces, and smash them in the gutters.
Tea and coffee are, of course, much milder in their effects than alcohol; you can play with them longer, and the punishment will be less severe. But if you make habitual use of them, you will pay the penalty which all drugs exact from the system. Your brain and your nerve centers will be less sensitive, less capable of working except under the influence of drugs; their reacting power will be dulled, and they will wear out more quickly. I have watched the slaves of the "morning cup of coffee," and know how they suffer whenthey do not get it. Likewise, I have watched the tea drinkers. It is comical to live in England, and see all the able-bodied men obliged to leave their work at four o'clock in the afternoon, and seek the regular stimulus for their tired nerves. If you are to meet anybody, it is always for "tea" that the ceremony is set, and if you refuse to drink tea, your hostess will be uncomfortable, unable to talk about anything but the strange, incredible notion that one can live without tea. I discovered after a while the solution of this problem; I would say that I preferred a little hot water, if you please, and so my hostess would pour me a cup of hot water, and I would sit and gravely sip it, and everybody would be perfectly content: I was conforming to the outward appearance of normality, which is what the British conventions require.
I have never drunk a cup of coffee, so I do not know what its effect on me would be. But some fifteen years ago I drank a glass of very weak iced tea at eight o'clock in the evening, and did not get to sleep until four or five the next morning. So I know that there is really a drug in tea. I know also that I might accustom my system to it, just as I might learn to poison my lungs with nicotine without being made immediately and suddenly ill; but why should I wish to do this? Life is so interesting to me that I do not need to stimulate my brain centers in order to appreciate the thrill of it. And when I am tired, I can rest myself by listening to music, or by reading a worth-while novel—things which I have found do not leave the after effects of nicotine.
I remember the first time I met Jack London. Our meeting consisted in good part of his "kidding" me, because I was lacking in the congenial vices of the café. He told me how much I had missed, because I had never been drunk; One ought to try the great adventure, at least once! Poor Jack is gone, because his kidneys gave out at forty; and nothing could seem more ungracious than to point out that I am still alive, and finding life enjoyable. Yet, in this book we are trying to find out how to live, and if there are habits which wreck and destroy a magnificent physique, and bring a great genius to death at the age of forty—surely the rest of us want to know about it, and to be warned in time. I mention Jack London in this connection, because he has said the last word on the subject of alcohol. Read "John Barleycorn," and especially read between the lines of it,and you will not need my argument to persuade you to be glad that the Eighteenth Amendment has been written into the Constitution, and that it is your duty as a Socialist, not merely to obey it, but to vote for its enforcement.
I am proceeding on the assumption that your life is of importance to you; that you have a job to do which you know to be worth while, and to which you desire to apply your powers. You agree with me that the workers of the world are suffering, and that it is necessary for them to find their freedom, and that this takes hard work and hard thinking. You may say that I exaggerate the amount of harm that is done to the system by tea and coffee, alcohol and tobacco. Well, let us assume that in moderate quantities they do no harm at all: even so, I have the right to ask you to show that they do some good; otherwise, surely, it is a mistake for the workers to spend their savings upon them.
Consider, for example, the amount of money which the wage slaves of the world spend upon tobacco. Suppose they could be persuaded for two or three years to spend this amount upon good reading matter—do you not think there would be an improvement in their condition? Surely you cannot maintain that the use of tobacco is necessary to the activities of the brain! Surely you do not think that a man has to have a cigarette in order to stimulate his thoughts, or to smoke a pipe to rest himself after his work is done! I offer myself as evidence in such a controversy; I have written as many books as any man in the radical movement, and the sum total of my lifetime smoking amounts to one-half of one cigarette. I tried that when I was eight years old, and somebody told me a policeman would arrest me if he caught me, and I threw away the cigarette, and ran and hid in an alley, and have not yet got over my scare.
In the "Journal for Industrial Hygiene" for October, 1920, is an article entitled "Fatigue and Efficiency of Smokers in a Strenuous Mental Occupation." Experiments were conducted among telegraph operators, and the result showed that "the heavy smokers of the group show a higher output rate at the beginning of the day than the light smokers, but their rate falls off more markedly in the late hours, and their production for the whole day is definitely less than that of the light smokers. The heavy smokers also show less ability than the light smokers to respond to increasing pressure ofwork in the late hours of the day by handling their full share of the work presented."
One point upon which every medical authority agrees is—that the use of nicotine is of deadly effect upon the immature organism. Half-grown youths who smoke cigarettes will never be full-sized men; they will never have normal lungs or a normal heart. And likewise, all authorities agree about the effect of smoking upon the organism of women. I gave what little help I could to the task of helping to set women free, and to make them the equals of men; but I was always pained when I discovered that some of my feminist friends understood by woman's emancipation no more than her right to adopt men's vices. I would say to these ardent young female radicals, who cultivate the art of dangling a cigarette from their lower lip, and sip cocktails out of coffee-cups in Greenwich Village cafés, that they will never be able to bear sound children; but I know that this would not interest them—they don't want to bear any children at all. So I say that they will never be able to think straight thoughts, and will be nervous invalids when they are thirty.
We went to war to make the world safe for democracy, and we put several millions of our young men into armies, and if there were any of them who did not already know how to smoke cigarettes, they learned it under official sanction. So now we have a national tobacco bill that runs up to two billions, and will insure us a new generation of "Class C" rating. Speaking to the young radicals who are reading my books, I say: We want to make the world over, to make it a place of freedom and kindness, instead of the hell of greed and hate that it is today. For that purpose we need a new moral code, and we can never win our victory without it. I have attended radical conventions, sitting in unventilated halls amid clouds of tobacco smoke, and listening to men wrangle all through the day and a great part of the night; I have watched the fatal dissensions in the movement, the quarrelings of the right wingers and the left wingers and all stages and degrees in between, and I have wondered—not jestingly, but in pitying earnest—how much of all those personalities and factional misunderstanding had their origin in carbon dioxide and nicotine. There is no use suggesting such ideas to the older men, whose habits are fixed; but a new generation is coming on, with a new vision of the enormoustask before it; and is it too much to expect of these young men and women, that they shall realize in advance the grim tasks they have to do, and shall learn to run the machine of their body so as to get out of it the maximum amount of service? Is it too much to hope for, that some day we shall have a race of young fighters for truth and justice, who are willing to live abstemious lives, and consecrate themselves to the task of delivering mankind from wage slavery and war?
(Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, clothing, bathing and sleep.)
(Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, clothing, bathing and sleep.)
In discussing the question of health, we have given the greater part of the space to the subject of diet, for the reason that experience has convinced us that diet is two-thirds of health, and that nearly always in disease you find errors of diet playing a part. There are, however, other important factors of health, now to be discussed.
Everything of which the body makes use is taken in the form of food and drink, with the exception of one substance, the oxygen we get out of the air. Every time we draw a breath we take in a certain amount of oxygen, and every time we expel a breath, we drive out a certain amount of a gas called carbon dioxide, which is what the body makes of the fuel it burns. The body can get along for several days without water, and for two or three months without food, but it can only get along for two or three minutes without oxygen. It should be obvious that when the body expels carbon dioxide, with a slight mixture of other more poisonous gases, and sucks back what it expects will be a fresh supply of oxygen, it wants to get oxygen, and not the same gases it has just expelled, nor gases which have been expelled from the lungs of other people.
In the days when primitive man lived outdoors, he did not have to think about this problem. When he breathed poison from his lungs, the moving air of nature blew it away, and the infinite vegetation of nature took the carbon dioxide and turned it back into oxygen. And even when man built himself shelters, he was not cunning enough to make them air-tight; he had to leave a big hole for the smoke to get out, and smaller holes through which to get light. But now our wonderful civilization has solved these problems; we make our walls of air-tight plaster, and we have invented a substance which will admit light without admitting air. So we have the "white plague" of tuberculosis, and so we haveinnumerable minor plagues of coughs and colds and sore throats.
In the summer time the solution of the problem is easy. Have as many doors and windows in your home as possible, and keep them open, and have nothing in your home to make dust or to retain dust. But then comes stormy and cold weather, and you have to close your doors and windows, and keep your home at a higher temperature than the air outside. How shall you do this, and at the same time get a continual supply of fresh air?
I will take the various methods of heating one by one. The problem in each case is simple and can be made clear in a sentence or two.
First, the open fireplace. This is a perfect solution, if you have enough fuel, and do not have to worry about the waste of heat. An open fireplace draws out all the air in the room in a short time, and you do not have to bother about opening doors or windows; you may be sure that the air is getting in through some cracks, or else the fire would not burn.
Second, a wood or coal or gas stove in the room, provided with a proper vent, so that all the gases of combustion are drawn up the chimney. This changes the air more slowly than an open fireplace, but it does the work fairly well. All that you have to be careful about is that your vent is sufficiently large and is working properly. If your fire does not "draw," you will have smoke or coal-gas in the house, and this is bad for the lungs; but worse for the lungs is a gas that you can neither see nor smell nor taste, the deadly carbon monoxide. This gas is produced by incomplete combustion, and whenever you see yellow flames from gas or coal, you are apt to have this poisonous substance. Small quantities of it are sufficient to cause violent headaches, and repeated doses of it are fatal. Men who work in garages which are not properly ventilated run this risk all the time, because carbon monoxide is one of the products of imperfect combustion in the gas engine.
Next, the furnace. A furnace sends fresh warm air into your house; the only trouble is that it takes out all the moisture, and some authorities say that this is bad for the lungs and throat. I do not know whether this is true, but all furnaces are supposed to have a water chamber to supplymoisture to the air, and you should keep a pan of water on every stove or radiator in your house.
Next, steam heat, which includes hot-water heating. This is one of the abominations of our civilization, and one of the methods by which our race is committing suicide. There is nothing wrong about steam heat in itself; the room is warmed in a harmless way; but the trouble is it stays warm only so long as the doors and windows are kept shut. You are in an air-tight box, and can be warm provided you do not mind being suffocated. The moment you open a door or window, you have a cold draft on your feet, and if you wish to change the air entirely you have to let out all the heat; so, of course, you never do change it entirely, but go on breathing the same air over and over, and every time you breathe it the condition of your body is a little more reduced.
The solution of this problem is not to heat the air in the room, but to use your steam coils to heat fresh air, and then drive this air, already warmed, into the room, at the same time providing a vent through which the old air can be pushed out. This is the hot air system of heating, and it requires some kind of engine or dynamo, and therefore is expensive. It has been installed in a few office buildings and theaters. One of the most perfect systems I ever inspected is in the building of the New York Stock Exchange, where the air is warmed in winter, and cooled in summer, and freed from dust, and exactly the right quantity is supplied. It is a humorous commentary upon our civilization that we take perfect care of the breathing apparatus of our stock-gamblers, but pay no attention to the breathing apparatus of our senators and congressmen, whose one business in life is to use their lungs. The stately old building with its white marble domes looks impressive in moving pictures and on illustrated postcards, but it has no system of ventilation whatever, and is a death-trap to the poor wretches who are compelled to spend their days, and sometimes their nights, within its walls. This contrast is one symptom of the rise of industrial capitalism and the collapse of political democracy.
We have reserved to the last a method of heating which is the worst, and can only be described as a crime against health: the use of gas and oil stoves set out in the middle of the room, without a vent, and discharging their fumes into the room. These stoves are simply instruments of slow death,and their manufacture should be prohibited by law. In the meantime, what you have to do is to refuse to live in a room or to work in an office where such stoves are used. I have heard dealers insist that this or the other kind of gas or oil stove was so contrived as to consume all the fumes. Do not let anybody fool you with such nonsense. There has never been any form of combustion devised which consumes all the fumes. No such thing can be, because the products of combustion are not combustible. The so-called "wickless blue flame" stoves do burn all the oil, and a properly regulated gas stove will burn all the gas, but that simply means that it turns the oil and gas into carbon dioxide, the very substance which your lungs are working day and night to get out of your body.
Moreover, there is no oil or gas stove which ever burns perfectly all the time, either because there is too much gas or insufficient air. Oil and gas stoves sometimes give a partly yellow flame. You can cause them to give a yellow flame at any time by blowing air against them, and that yellow flame means imperfect combustion, and a probability of the deadly carbon monoxide. These facts are known to every chemist and to every student of hygiene, and the fact that civilized people continue to burn such oil and gas stoves in their homes and offices is simply one more proof that our civilization values human welfare and health at nothing whatever in comparison with profits.
Not merely should you see that you have a continuous supply of fresh air in your home, but you should try to keep down dust in your home, and especially fine particles of lint. Once upon a time our ancestors were unable to make houses and floors tight, and so they put rugs on the floors and hung tapestries on the walls to keep out the wind. We civilized people are able to make both floors and walls absolutely tight, and yet we continue to use rugs and curtains, it being the first principle of our education that propriety requires us to continue to do the things which our ancestors did. I am unable to think of a more silly or stupid thing in the world than a rug or a curtain, but I have lived in the house with them all my life, because, alas, the ladies cannot be happy otherwise. They want their homes to be "pretty," and so they continue to set dust traps, and to set themselves futile jobs of house cleaning and shopping.
Not all of us are able to be out of doors as much as we ought to be, but all of us spend seven or eight hours out of every twenty-four in sleep, and this time at least we ought to spend out of doors. I understand that this is futile advice to give to the very poor. I was poor myself for many years, and had to put all my clothes on at night in order to keep warm, and even then I could not always do it. Nevertheless, from the time I first realized the importance of ventilation I never slept in a room with a closed window.
I say, sleep outdoors if you possibly can. You do not have to be afraid of exposure, for cold will not hurt you if you keep your body in proper condition. I have slept out in a rubber blanket, with the rain beating on my head and face; I have spread a rubber blanket on a hummock in the midst of a swamp, and waked up in the morning with my hair and face soaked in cold, white fog, but I never caught cold from such things; there is no harm whatever in dampness or in "night air," if you are in proper condition. Of course, you may get your ears frostbitten in the middle of winter, but you can have a sleeping hood to remove that danger.
The "nature cure" enthusiasts, who lay so much stress upon an outdoor life, also insist that the wearing of clothes is a harmful civilized custom. They urge us to take "sun baths" and to "ventilate the skin." Now, as a matter of fact, the skin does not breathe, it merely gives out moisture, and it does not give out any less because we have clothing on us, provided the clothing is dry and clean, and will absorb moisture. But bye and bye the clothing becomes loaded with the waste substances given out by the skin, and then it will absorb no more, and if you do not change your clothing, no doubt it may have some effect upon health.
But the principal evil of civilized clothing is that it binds the body and prevents the free play of the muscles, and, more important yet, stops the free circulation of the blood. I have already discussed hats, which are the principal cause of baldness. I will go to the other extremity of the body, and mention tight shoes, which, strange as it may seem, cause headaches and colds. You will be able to find a few civilized men with normal feet, but you will hardly ever find a woman whose toes are not crowded together and misshapen. I have said that the human body is one organism, and that it is fedand its health maintained by the blood-stream; I say now that the circulation of the blood is one thing, and if you block it at any one place, you block it everywhere. Of course, not all the blood-stream goes down into the feet, but some of it does, and if it is clogged in the feet, and the blood vessels cramped and crowded, there is a certain amount of poison kept in the system, which the system should have got rid of.
Why do women wear tight shoes? Because the leisure class members of their sex have been kept in harems and used as the playthings of men. To be fragile and delicate was the thing admired by the masters of wealth, and to have small hands and feet was a sign that women belonged to this parasite class. Therefore at all hazards women's feet must be kept small, even at the expense of their health and happiness; and so they put themselves up on several inches of heels, which cause them to toddle around like marionettes on a stage, with all their toes crowded down into a lump.
Why do men wear tight bands around their scalps, which cause their hair to drop out, and tight, stiff columns around their necks, which stop the circulation of the blood into their heads, and cause them to have headaches instead of ideas? The reason is that for ages the rulers of the tribe have wished to demonstrate publicly their superiority to the common herd, which does the menial tasks. In England all gentlemen wear tall black silk band-boxes on their heads, and in America they have a choice among several varieties of round tight boxes. All men who work in offices wear stiffly starched collars and cuffs, as a means of demonstrating their superiority to the common workers, who have to sweat at their necks. I think it is not too much to hope that when class exploitation is done away with, we shall also get rid of these class symbols, and choose our clothing because it is warm and comfortable, and not according to the perverted imbecilities of "style."
The skin gives out perspiration which is greasy; also the skin is constantly growing, putting out layers of cells which dry up and are worn off. We need to bathe with soap to remove the grease, and we need to rub with a towel to brush away the dead cells of the skin, so that the pores may be kept open. No one is taking care of his body who does not wash and rub it once every twenty-four hours, and once or twice a week with warm water and soap. It is often statedthat hot baths are weakening, but I have never found it so; however, I think it is a bad practice to pamper the body, which should be accustomed to the shock of cold water. The rule as to bathing, both as to temperature and time, is simple. If, after the bath and rub-down, your body has reacted and you feel vigorous and fresh, that bath has done you good. If, on the other hand, you feel chilled and depressed, then you have been too long in the water, or its temperature was too low. Every person has to find his own rules in such matters. The only general rule is that as one grows older the body reacts less quickly.
All day, as we work and think, we store up more poisons in our cells than the body can get rid of, and the time comes when the cells are so loaded with poisons that we have to stop for a while, and let our blood-stream clean house. The quantity of sleep one needs is a problem like that of cold water; each person has to find his own rule. In general, one needs less and less sleep as one grows older. Infants sleep the greater part of the time; growing children should sleep ten or eleven hours, adults seven or eight, and old people, unless they have let themselves get fat, generally do not want to sleep more than six, and part of this in short naps. When you sleep, your bodily energies relax, and you make less heat, therefore you need extra clothing; but this clothing should never cover the mouth and nose, nor should it be so heavy as to make breathing a burden. If you are in good condition, it will do you no harm to be chilly when you sleep, except that you do not sleep so soundly. Sleeping too much is just as harmful as sleeping too little. Nature will tell you that. The important thing, as in all other problems of health, is to have something interesting to think about, some exciting work to do in the world, and then you will sleep as little as you have too.
(Deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and the overworked.)
(Deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and the overworked.)
In discussing the important question of exercise, there is one fundamental fact to begin with: that our present civilization divides men sharply into two classes, those who do not get enough exercise, and those who get too much. Obviously it would be folly to make the same recommendations to the two classes.
I begin with those who get too much exercise. They include a great number, probably the majority of those who do the manual work of the world. They include the farmers and the farm-hands, who work from dawn to sunset, and sometimes by lantern light. They include also the farmers' wives, the kitchen slaves of whom the old couplet tells:
I am aware that men have worked that way for countless ages, and yet the race is still surviving; but I am aware also that men wither up with rheumatism, and contract chronic diseases of the kidneys and the blood vessels, consequent upon the creation of greater quantities of fatigue poisons than the body can regularly eliminate.
I have very little interest in the past, and none whatever in finding fault with it. My purpose is to criticize the present for the benefit of the future, and therefore I say that modern machinery and the whole development of modern large-scale production make it absolutely unnecessary that women should slave all their waking hours in kitchens, or that men should slave all day. I say it is monstrous folly that men should work for twelve-hour stretches in steel mills, and for ten and eleven hours in factories and mines. Organized labor has adopted the slogan, "Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for play"; but my slogan is "Four hours for work, four hours for study, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for play."
I know, and am prepared to demonstrate to any thinking man, that modern civilization can produce, not merely all the necessities, but all the comforts of life for every man, woman and child in the community, by the expenditure of four hours a day work of the adult, able-bodied men and women. So to all the wage slaves of the factories and mines, the fields and the kitchens, I say that too much exercise is what is the matter with you, and what you need is to get off in a quiet nook in the woods and read a good novel, not merely for a few hours, but for a few months, until you get over the effects of capitalist civilization. I know that not many of you can get away as yet, but I urge you to insist upon getting away, to fight for the chance to get away; and I will here suggest a few of the novels for you to read when finally you do get away. I choose the easy ones, which the dullest and most tired of you will love; I say, make up your mind to read these thirty-two books before you die, and do not let the world cheat you out of your chance!
Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Charles D. Stewart: The Fugitive Blacksmith. W. Clark Russell: The Wreck of the Grosvenor. R. L. Stevenson: Treasure Island, Kidnapped. Jack London: The Sea Wolf, The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden. Joseph Conrad: Youth. H. G. Wells: The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, The Sea Lady, The History of Mr. Polly, The Food of the Gods, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Upton Sinclair: The Jungle, King Coal, Jimmie Higgins, 100 Per Cent. Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie. George Moore: Esther Waters. Frank Norris: The Octopus. Brand Whitlock: The Turn of the Balance. De Foe: Robinson Crusoe. Fielding: Tom Jones, Jonathan Wild the Great. Thackeray: The Adventures of Barry Lyndon. Marmaduke Pickthall: The Adventures of Hadji Baba. Blasco Ibanez: The Fruit of the Vine. Frank Harris: Montes the Matador. Frederik van Eeden: The Quest. Tolstoi: Resurrection.
And now for the people who do not get enough exercise. In the armies of King Cyrus it was the law that every man was required to sweat once every twenty-four hours, and that is still the law for every business man and office-worker and writer of books. There is no substitute for it, and there is no health without it. I have heard Dr. Kellogg say that the modern woman sends out her health with her washing, andI have heard the leisure class ladies at the Sanitarium discuss this cryptic utterance and wonder what he meant by it. I know that there is use telling leisure class ladies what exercise at the wash-tub would do for their abdomens and backs. I will only tell them that unless they can find some kind of vigorous activity which keeps them in a free perspiration for an hour or two each day, they will never be really well, and will never bear children without agony and abortion.
For myself, I have found that the minimum is three or four times a week. Unless I get that much hard exercise I am soon in trouble. So my advice to the business man is to take off his coat and collar and turn out and help his truck-man; my advice to the white collar slave is to get a part-time job, and dig ditches the rest of the time. To the man who has cares which pursue him, and likewise to the ardent student and brain-worker, I say that they should find, not merely exercise, but play. The distinction between the two things is important. There can be play that is not exercise, for example cards and chess; and, of course, there can be exercise that is not play. What you must have is something that is both play and exercise; something that not merely causes your heart to beat fast, and your lungs to pump fast, and your sweat glands to throw out poisons from your body, but something that fully occupies your mind and gives your higher brain centers a chance to relax.
Our civilization has very largely destroyed the possibility of play and the spirit of play. We civilized people no longer know what play is, and regard the desire to play as something abnormal—a form of vice. We allow children to play after school hours, and on Saturdays; but for grown-up, serious-minded men and women to want to play would be almost as disreputable as for them to want to get drunk. What could foe more pitiful than the spectacle of tens of thousands of men crowding into our baseball parks and amusement fields to watch other men play for them! Imagine, if you can, a crowd of people gathering in a restaurant or theater to watch other peopleeatfor them! Imagine yourself a man from Mars, coming down to a world with so many people in want, and finding whole classes of men forbidden to do any work, under penalty of disgrace, and compelled, in order to exercise their muscles, to pull on rubber straps and lift weights and wave dumb-bells and Indian clubs in the air—methods of expendingtheir muscular energy which are respectable because they accomplish nothing!
When I was a boy, I was fond of all kinds of games. I was a good tennis player, and in the country an incessant hunter and fisherman. When on the city streets we boys could not find any other game to play, we would get up on the roofs of the houses and throw clothes-pins and snow-balls at the "Dagoes" working in the nearby excavations; so we had the fine game of being chased by the "Dagoes," with the chance, real or imaginary, of having a knife stuck into us. But then, as I grew older, and became aware of the pain and misery of the world, I lost my interest in games, and for ten years or so I never played; I did nothing but study and write. So my health gave way, and I had the problem of restoring it, and I spent some twenty years wrestling with this problem, before I thoroughly convinced myself on the point that there can be no such thing as sound and permanent health without a certain amount of play.
I don't think there is any kind of hard physical work I failed to try, in the course of my experiments. I rode horseback, and took long walks, and climbed mountains, and swam, and dug gardens, and chopped down whole groves of trees and cut them up and carried them to the fireplace. I have done this latter work for a whole winter in the country, several hours every day, and it has done my health no good to speak of; I have been ready for a breakdown at the end of it. The reason is that all the time I was doing these things with my body, I was going right on working my brain. While I was swimming or climbing a mountain or galloping on horseback, I was absorbed in the next chapter of the book I was writing, so that I literally did not know where I was. I would make up my mind that I would not think about my work, and would make desperate efforts not to do so; but it was like walking along the edge of a slippery ditch—sooner or later I was bound to fall in, and go floundering along, unable to get out again!
And the same thing applies to all gymnastic work. I have experimented with a dozen different systems of exercises, and with all kinds of water treatments; I have used dumb-bells and Indian clubs and Swedish gymnastics, MacFadden's exercises in bed, and the Yogi breathing exercises, and more kinds of queer things than I can remember now; but for methere is only one solution of the problem, which is to have an antagonist. It may be a deer I am trying to shoot, or some trout I am trying to lure out of their holes; it may be some boys I am trying to beat at football or hockey, or it may be the game I know best and find most convenient, which is tennis. If it is tennis, then it has to be someone who can make me work as hard as I know how; for if it is someone I can beat easily, why, before I have been playing ten minutes, I am busily working out the next chapter of a book, or answering letters I have just got in the mail.
Recently I came upon a book, "The Psychology of Relaxation," by Dr. Patrick, in which the theory of this is set forth. Civilized man is working his higher brain centers more than his body can stand; his brain is running away with him, absorbing a constantly increasing share of his energies. True relaxation is only possible where the higher brain centers are lulled, and the back lobes of the brain brought into activity. One of the means of doing this is alcohol, and that is why through the ages all races of men have craved to get drunk. There is a method which is harmless, and does not break down the system, and that is play. When we become really interested in play, we are as children, or as primitive man; we do all the things that our race used to do many ages ago; we hunt and fight, we pit our wits against the wits of our enemies, and struggle with desperation to get the better of them. If our play is physical play, if we are absorbed in a game or bodily contest, then we are exerting and developing all those portions of us which civilization tends to atrophy and deaden.
There are people who will dispute with you about Socialism, and ask, how we are going to provide incentives if we do away with wage slavery. When you tell them that activity is natural to human beings, and that if there were no work, men and women would have to make some, they shake their heads mournfully and tell you about the problem of "human nature." But consider games and sports: men do not have to work their bodies, yet they go out and deliberately hunt for trouble! They invent themselves subtle and complicated games, and are not content until they find people who can beat them at it, or at any rate can make them work to the limit of their strength, until they are in a dripping perspiration and thoroughly exhausted! I may be too optimistic about"human nature," but I believe that this is the attitude every normal human being takes toward the powers, both mental and physical, which he possesses; he wants to use them, and for all they are worth. If you don't believe it, just take any group of youngsters, give them a baseball and bat, turn them loose in a vacant lot, and watch them "choose up sides" and fall to work, screaming and shouting in wild excitement! There are some races of the earth which do not yet know baseball, but the Filipinos and the Japanese have learned it, and even the war-worn "Poilus" and the supercilious "Tommies" condescended to experiment with it. And if you think it is only physical competition that young human animals enjoy, try them at putting on a play, or printing a magazine, or conducting a debate, or building a house—anything whatever that involves healthy competition, and is related to the big things of life, but without being for the profit of some exploiter! Get clear the plain and simple distinction between work and play: play is what you want to do, while work is what the profit system makes you do!