Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/803

Rh heavy and gross that half the power, which might otherwise go off in vivacity or nerve or spirit, is expended in the physico-chemical labor that is demanded for keeping the body warm and moving and living.

To these drawbacks is added the unequal struggle for existence, the partitioning off of our people into great classes, the millions of whom are obliged to work from morning to night, compared with the thousands who are at liberty to make some change in their course of life; the millions of adults who may be said to be tied to some continuous, monotonous round of labor, until the whole body lends itself to the task with an automatic regularity which the mind follows in unhappy and fretful train, with little hope for any future whatever on earth that shall bring relief.

From whatever side we look upon this picture it seems at first sight to present an almost insoluble problem, when the conception of mixing recreation with work, so as to make all work recreative, is considered. Among the masses there is no true recreation whatever, no real variation from the daily unceasing and all but hopeless toil; nay, when we ascend from the industrial and purely muscular workers to the majority who live by work, we find little that is more hopeful. There is no true recreation among any class except one, and that a limited and happy few, who find in mental labor of a varied and congenial kind the diversity of work which constitutes the truly re-creative and re-created life.

We get, in fact, a little light on the nature of healthful recreation as we let our minds rest on this one and almost exceptional class of men of varied life and action of a mental kind. They come before us showing what recreation can effect through the mere act of varying the labor. The brain-worker who is divested of worry is at once the happiest and the healthiest of mankind—happiest, perchance, because healthiest; a man constantly re-created, and therefore of longest life.

Dr. Beard, of New York, who has recently computed the facts bearing on this particular point, gives us a reading upon it which is singularly appropriate to the topic now under consideration. He has reckoned up the life-value of five hundred men of greatest mental activity: poets, philosophers, men of science, inventors, politicians, musicians, actors, and orators; and he has found the average duration of their lives to be sixty-four years. He has compared this average with the average duration of the life of the masses, and he has found in all classes, the members of which have survived to twenty years of age, the duration to be fifty years. He, therefore, gives to the varied brain workers a value of life of fourteen years above the average. By a later calculation, relating to a hundred men belonging, we may say, to our own time, he has discovered a still greater value of life in those who practice mental labor, seventy years being the mean value of life in them. Thereupon he has inquired into the cause of these differences, so strange and so startling, and has detected, through this analysis, as I and others have, a combination of saving causes, the one cause most