Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/811

Rh because the recreation is special as a sometimes harmful recreation, but because more persons are concerned in it just now than in aught else of the same kind of recreative pursuit.

There are many other so-called recreations which are even more injurious to the feeble adolescent and to the enfeebled matured individuals, who seek to find symmetry of health in extreme recreation. Football is one of these recreations fraught with danger. Rowing is another exercise of the same class. Polo, while the fever for it lasted, was found to be of similar cast. Excessive running and prolonged and violent walking—in imitation of those poor madmen whose vanity trains them to give up sleep and all the natural ordinances that they may walk so many thousand miles in so many thousand hours—these are alike injurious as physical recreations unless taken with the same discrimination as is required by those who enter into the Volunteer movement.

As we pass from the freer and wealthier classes of the community into the less prosperous we find no marked improvement whatever in any form of recreation. We begin, in fact, to lose sight of the recreation that ministers to either mind or body in a sensible and healthy degree, and to see that which should be recreative replaced almost entirely by continuous and monotonous labor. The idea of symmetry of function and development between mind and body disappears nearly altogether; so that, indeed, to mention such a thing would, in some of the classes concerned, be but to treat on a subject unknown, and therefore, as it would seem to them, absurdly unpractical. To tell a country yokel that his body is not symmetrical in build, and that his mind has no kind of symmetrical relation to his body, were cruel, from its apparent satire. Yet why should it be? Why should ignorance and labor so deform any one that the hope of a complete reformation, the hope of the constitution of a perfect body and in it a perfect mind, should seem absurd? It is not the labor that is at fault. The labor is wholesome, healthful, splendid; it is a labor compatible with the noblest, nay, the most refined of human acquirements. Why should it be incompatible with perfect physical conformation of mind and body? It is not, indeed, the labor that is at fault, but the ignorant system on which it is carried out.

There is much difference, in fact, between the three classes of the community called the domestic, the agricultural, and the industrial, in respect to the work, the recreation, and the resultant health pertaining to each class. The domestic class as a whole is, by comparison with the industrial, fairly favored. The members of it lead, it is true, a monotonous life, and see often but little of the beauties of external nature, but they find in the amusements they provide for those who are about them some intervals of change which are, as far as they go, of service. Moreover, except in that part of the class which is engaged in disposing of spirituous drinks, and which pays a heavy vital taxation from the recreation springing out of that vocation, its representatives are not exposed