Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/408

394 illustrated lately in a busy manufacturing settlement in the State of Massachusetts. The city of L had erected and equipped a costly high-school edifice with a corps of highly paid instructors, to initiate in the more advanced branches of scholarship at the public charge pupils of whom only a minority could hope to utilize these expensive accomplishments in everyday life. All seems to have been regarded with complacency until the charge for an unusually complete ventilating apparatus was encountered. One would have thought that all pupils, whether or not able to solve a problem in differential calculus or to construe a line of Virgil, would have excellent use for their own bodies; but neither this consideration nor the almost infinitesimal magnitude of this particular outlay an outlay—which, including current expenses and interest on capital, was about half a cent per occupant daily, in comparison with the strictly scholastic expenses—sufficed to reconcile the objectors to such unheard-of extravagance! Poverty of valid arguments was compensated by strength of epithets, and such expressions as "cranky" and "visionary" were freely applied to those who had thought it improper that rooms packed with adolescent humanity and seldom, alas! quite free from victims of contagious diseases, should be unprovided with at least a sufficiency of breathing air. The incident showed that even in cultured New England there was a minority—fortunately, a minority only—not yet emancipated from the mediæval fantasy which contemned Nature, and which regarded the soul and the body as hostile entities, both indeed corrupt, but the latter only hopelessly so, and fit only to be "mortified" and suppressed. A strange infatuation, surely, to have held its ground for nineteen centuries, in face of the lesson left by the matchless educators of Hellas in the harmonious development of every faculty and every sense!

Communications received within a few months past from various boards of health and of education have left no doubt in the mind of the writer that the incident at L is a typical, not an isolated one; for example, prior to March of this year there was