Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/810

790 be on a level with younger and athletic men, and I have been obliged to hear of the signal and natural failure of the effort. I have heard of the attempts to meet the failure by the tempting offer and too willing acceptance of what are called artificial stimulants to give temporary support, and I have been obliged to discover in persons so overtaxed and so over-stimulated a certain. heavy excessive draw on the bank of life, an anticipation of income which, in the vital as surely as in the commercial world, is the road to a premature failure and closure of the whole concern.

There are many who will agree with me, I doubt not, on this point; there are many men, and there are more women—for wives and mothers are far more observant and wise than husbands and fathers on these points—who will be able to bring their experience to bear in confirmation of that which I have spoken; and these will agree that to put men of different ages and of different states of constitution and habits in the same position for recreation; to trot them all through the same paces; to make them all wear the same dress, walk or march the same speed, carry the same load, labor the same time, move the limbs at the same rate; that to construct one great living machine out of a number of such differently built machines is of necessity an unnatural and, in the end, a ruinous process. There are some, however, who, while admitting so much, will put in a plea for the younger members of the community. They will insist that the younger men, the men who are from nineteen or twenty up to twenty-nine or thirty, may with advantage go through the recreation of training after the Volunteer fashion. The case is much stronger on behalf of this argument, but even in the respect named there requires a great deal of discrimination. A race of strong men may be bred, and a weak race may, by gradual development, be raised into a strong; but a weak man, born weak, can, through himself, be led a very little way into strength; while during the process of training he can most easily be broken into utter feebleness, so that the last of the man may be worse than the first. Hence, in training the weak into strong through any form of recreation, mental or physical, but specially physical, there must be a singular discrimination. In this instance of Volunteering as a mode of progress in physical health for the young there are dangers that ought to be avoided with religious care. To advise a weakly youth of consumptive tendency and feeble build, or one having some special proclivity to rheumatic fever, heart-disease, or other well-defined hereditary malady, to compete with other men of the same age and of athletic nature, in the same recreative exercise, is to deceive the youth into danger. To force such a one into violent competitive exercise, and tax him to the same degree of vital withdrawal day after day, or week after week, is to subject him all but certainly to severe, if not fatal, bodily injury.

I have selected the recreative exercise of Volunteering as a case for illustration of an important lesson, and I have made the selection, not