Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/160



Primitive nations can dispense with physical training-schools as the creatures of the wilderness dispense with houses and clothes, but city-dwellers need a substitute for the lost opportunities of outdoor exercise. Mental culture and gymnastics should be as inseparable as body and soul. "It is impossible to repress luxury by legislation," says Solon in Lucian's "Dialogues of Anacharsis," but its influence may be counteracted by athletic games, which invigorate the body and give a martial character to the amusements of our young men." And that remedial use of gymnastics requires the supervision of an expert teacher. It is not enough to provide an assortment of training-school apparatus and trust visitors to use it to good advantage. We might as well establish a free public drug-store and invite patients to come in and help themselves. I have seen athletics on the Let-Alone plan tried in a city park, and remember the results in the case of novices who