Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/150

144 distinguishes the youngsters of the progressive nations from the whelps of decadence. Football, baseball, aquatic sports, and the "Hare and Hound" races of the British colleges, serve a purpose of moral as well as physical sanitation, for some of the besetting vices of youth are symptoms of abnormal physical inactivity—effects, in fact, as often as causes of disease.

No clamor for outing-sports interfere with the curriculum of South-European colleges, and that fact is far more ominous than the alleged tendency to rowdyism that alarms old women of both sexes in our Northern university towns. The civilization of Greece and Moorish Spain sprang from barbarism like water from the rock in the desert of Sinai, while physical indolence is the torpor that precedes the collapse of moribund nations, and heralds a moral night that knows no morning.