Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/813

Rh hear the same sounds, smell the same odors, touch the same things, feel the same impressions, again and again and again, until the existence is made up of them, never to be varied until death doth them part. It is to this class—repining, naturally envious, naturally restless, and at this moment of time unsettled, mournful, and disaffected, to an extent which few, I fear, of our rulers comprehend—it is to this class most of all that the balm of wholesome recreation is most necessary, and for whom the absence of it is most dangerous. In this class there is no such thing as health. It is a blessing not to be found. You could not, I solemnly believe, bring me one of them that I dare, as a conscientious physician, declare, after searching examination, to be physically healthy in any approach to a degree of standard excellence. As a rule the average of life among those who have passed twenty-five would not be above fifteen years.

In these classes we see the effect of what I may venture to call the denseness of work, leading to mortality in the most perfect and distinctive form—work without any true recreative relief; work without anything changing or becoming recreative in itself; work relieved at no regular intervals for introduction of new life.

The greatest of all the social problems of our day is involved in this study of the manners and modes of thought of over five millions of adult English people, all confined in order that they may labor, with no satisfactory relief from labor, and with no land of promise before them. The greatest of all the political questions of our day is also involved in this same study. The physician knows that the wisest of mankind, the most intelligent of mankind, are only half their former selves when they are out of health. He knows that health which is bad, but not sufficiently bad to prostrate the physical powers to such an extent as to cause inactivity of the will, is the most perplexing of all states of mind and action with which he has to deal. He feels thereupon a fellow-sympathy with the political physician who is called upon to treat the industrial masses in mass; to provide for their minds' health, to calm their excitement, to plant confidence in their hearts, and, most arduous task of all, to find out the way for securing for them those two grand remedies in the Pharmacopœia of the ordinary physician, rest and change of scene, in pure and open air.

"They find their own recreations, these working millions," I think I hear some one say. They try to find them, would be the truer statement. They try their best, but they have found few conducive to health, many that are fatal. They are to be pitied and pardoned for these errors of their finding. What if they do discover recreation of the worst kind in the bar and saloon of the spirit-seller? Have they not the example of the wealthier classes before them, teaching that the same indulgence, in another style, is recreation? May they not ask how many other obtainable pleasures are provided for them, and whether many, too many, of obtainable pleasures so called, and so bad,