Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/28

 woman and child in the United States believes in being clean, and in what is compatible with that, and disbelieves in being dirty, and in what conduces to being dirty. It is a little point, but it is something that we agree on. The whole pressure of the American community is towards being physically clean. It is a mark of the national type that we intend to produce. A man who is dirty is dirty alone: a man who is clean is clean with the community. It is a little point, perhaps, but I notice that Mr. Kipling, in his latest book, declares that he has not met one man who wore the Victoria Cross "who had not strict notions about washing and shaving and keeping himself decent on his way through the civilized world, whatever he may have done outside it." "Somehow," he adds, "the clean and considerate man mostly seems to take hold of circumstances at the right end." Well, there is something definite that we all believe in; and are thankful for.

I turned in another direction. I inspected the cost of doctor and dentist in the family budget. I noticed the movement of medical inspection and corrective gymnastics in the schools. I observed the wide advertising of institutions to insure health, to prevent middle-aged men and women from getting fat, to restore old men to their youth, and to enable people to live for a hundred years. I asked what the benevolent millionaires were expending their millions for; and I found that they were pouring their millions into research for the extinction