Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/174

Rh can learn, for instance what rum does, what dissipation does, what self-indulgence does, not only on the morals but on the personal appearance.

Vanity is a moral force as well as a moral weakness: it depends on the direction and object.

When you cannot reach a young man's conscience by a temperance argument, you may reach his vanity by leading him up to a shaky, bleary, lying, home-cursing drunkard, and tell him that he is beginning to look like that!

Instead of lecturing? a young woman on the folly of fashion, tell her, and prove to her, that her beauty will be murdered; that her eyes will grow dim; that she will die an old maid, sour and wrinkled, if she continue to outrage the laws of Nature by tying herself in the middle with corset-strings like a living blood-pudding. Horrible taste! Tell her to open her bed-room window, and let in the part of her that is outside,—the fresh part, the sweet air that belongs to her heart, that her poor blood is rotting for. Tell her that unless she does these things, and walks and breathes and bends like an animal, as she is, instead of riding on horse-cars and buggies, and mincing on high-heeled shoes that distort her feet, and breathing contamination in her hermetically-sealed bedroom, she will get wrinkles round her toothless mouth, and blue circles under her