The American nation was startled first and then dismayed and
disheartened when the selective draft showed that our young men were fast
becoming weaklings. The great per cent of young men who were found to be either
physically or mentally unfit for military duty was like a fire alarm at night.
The
utter change that the customs of the country has undergone in the last 25 years,
the lack of sports, the absence of physical exercise, the ravages of disease,
the cigarette, soda fountain, picture show, hot house lives, and the absence of
everything calculated to produce manly vigor, have do devitalized the young manhood
of the country that serious alarm has been raised. Not only has been felt upon
the physical condition of the population, but like a canker it has eaten into
the moral and mental stamina of the young. Now there is a great cry, lead by
the National government itself, for better health, better physical habits,
better eating and drinking habits, more clean living, more out of door
exercise, and in short, more of everything that is likely to produce normal and
happy and strong and efficient human beings. This work will begin with the
infants in arms, nay with the mothers before the infants are born, and go all
the way up through the schools, through young manhood and womanhood, middle age
and old age, before we shall have succeeded in producing the vigorous and
healthy manhood and womanhood that we once had. The coming era is to be the era
of sane and happy living. The patent medicine habit and the dope habit and the
ease habit must go the way of the liquor habit.
We hail with joy any proposition that tends to develop the
spirit of outdoor sports. Baseball, the American game, has itself become
professionalized and commercialized. It was once a real national sport before
the day of professionalism. It should be encouraged in every community. We need
hospitals but we also need playground and sane living and clean exercise to
keep the population from falling prey to all the modern diseases that have
developed as a result of wrong living. Every community should have ball
grounds, tennis grounds, volley ball grounds, and all other kinds of grounds
that will encourage the population to use them. What indeed shall it profit a
man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? And what indeed shall it
profit us if we have the means of living comfortable and happy lives if we let
the inducement to languor and disease and physical laziness sap the vitality of
life generally and cut down the three score and ten years of a man’s life to
two score, which is becoming almost the dead line for the business and
professional man, and the period of decay, ugliness and weakness of the women?
Cosmetics cannot take the place of physical and joyous exercise in women any
more than soft drinks and tea parties can make children grow up strong and
manly and beautiful. The human body is a thing of marvelous beauty and
efficiency when given a chance to be. Modern habits might well be defined as a
conspiracy to enrich the medicine fakirs, the doctors and the sanitariums, and
to sap and devitalize the physical, moral and mental efficiency of mankind.
Help the boys to have a ball ground and put a Red Cross seal
on every middle aged man and woman who will stand for something better in the
community than the present scheme of devitalization and efficiency.
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