pendent upon good health that it becomes our first duty to keep ourselves in a superb physical condition.

Keeping physically fit to do the greatest thing we are capable of doing is the first great success commandment.

It is not enough to be free from pain or distressing symptoms of any kind. The health that counts is superb health, vigorous robust health, health which radiates force, buoyancy, virility, vim, initiative, magnetism. It is the sort of health which gives sparkle to the eye, elasticity to the step; the health which sharpens the wits and puts iron in the blood and lime in the backbone, sunshine into the disposition. It is the bubbling over quality of health which counts. This is what gives sprightliness to youth and joy and gladness to life.

What else is so grand as to stand on life's threshold, fresh, young, hopeful, with a consciousness of power equal to any emergency—a master of any situation? The glory of a young man is his strength.

How the world of our dreams changes the moment we are indisposed or feel ill! How quickly our bright pictures grow dull and a film obscures our ideals! Our ambition oozes out; discouragement overshadows the whole life. When the vitality drops, all the mental faculties are sick, too, and put on mourning. The whole life is in shadows.

Oh, to be strong, to feel the thrill of life in every nerve and fiber in middle life and old age as in youth; to exult in mere existence as boys do when they are gliding over fields of ice in the crisp and bracing air of winter!

This superabundance of life, more than you think you shall ever need, is a reservoir which is to last eighty or a hundred years; and when you are fifty or sixty and life comes to its greatest interest, scope, usefulness, and activity, then you will not admit, however temperate and disciplined you have been, that you have one ounce too much of vitality of body or brain for what lies before you and which your whole soul longs to attain.

We are not superbly equipped for our life work unless we keep ourselves in this superb condition. It is the surplus in the bank, the reserve capital that counts in hard times, in financial straits. It is this little surplus that so often saves business men from failure, in emergencies. It is the health surplus, the reserve in the physical bank, that protects us from bodily bankruptcy in times of great mental stress, physical strain in great emergencies.

When visiting the shipyards on the Clyde I was intensely interested in watching a huge machine which punched holes through great thick plates of steel and iron. The steel fingers of the machine would push their way through the solid steel plates as quietly and easily as a cook pushes her fingers through a piece of soft dough. There was not a [3]

quiver or a shake in any part of the machinery. The secret of this quiet energy was the enormous reserve, the great momentum, stored in a huge balance wheel. In this lay the power which was behind the apparent miracle wrought by the steel fingers. It is a large physical reserve which enables a human being to do great things with apparent ease, to go through great crises, to meet sudden emergencies easily without straining or striving.

A superb personality plays a tremendous part in a successful career, and there is no one thing which will improve one's personality so much as surplus health.

Personal magnetism, which is such a great factor in success, is largely physical. It depends to a great extent upon physical reserves. Magnetism cannot be forced. It is a radiation of conscious power. The better the health, the greater the magnetic attraction of the man or the woman.

"No man is in good health," said Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "who cannot stand in the free air of heaven, with his feet on God's free turf and thank his Creator for the simple luxury of physical existence." This is the sort of abounding health which makes one forceful, radiant, magnetic, full of joy, life, power.

To start out on an active career without putting one's self in a superb physical condition would be like trying to use a great electric power plant with

[4]

most of the dynamos out of commission through short circuits, burn outs, etc.

Who can ever estimate the terrible suffering from thwarted ambition, from dwarfed lives, dwarfed achievements, from genius being forced to do the work of mediocrity, to say nothing of the discomfort and pain, which have resulted from poor health, from depleted vitality!

"There is no kind of an achievement equal to perfect health. What to it are nuggets or millions!" cried Carlyle, whose own life was made wretched and career dwarfed by ill health.

Think of a man with Carlyle's brain being the victim of a dyspeptic stomach! Notwithstanding his great mental output, think of the tremendous loss of brain power, nerve energy, and the irritation and suffering caused this man, largely from the lack of knowledge of how to take care of himself, how to live!

When some one was congratulating Mrs. Carlyle on the work of her famous husband, she said: "But think, man, what he would have done, if he had had a digestion!"

Health is the first wealth. There is nothing which pays a human being so well, which so multiplies his power, as to keep in robust, vigorous health.

When the blood is pure through eating pure food scientifically prepared, through right living habits and right thinking, we are in little danger

from the multitude of health enemies that might otherwise attack us.

The amount and quality of our blood depends almost entirely on our food. The Napoleonic maxim, "An army moves on its stomach," is as true of the individual as of an army.

We know how going without food, even for a day or two, unless we are used to fasting, cuts down one's physical vigor and also the vigor of the mental faculties. The brain gets an immense amount of credit which really should go to the stomach.

It

Physical vigor is the basis of mental power. is not always the better brain, but the better-nourished brain, the best backed-up brain, that achieves the most.

The brain can not give out anything which is not passed up to it from the blood, and the purity of the blood depends not only upon the right kind of food, but upon right life habits, pure air and sunlight, healthful recreation, plenty of play, joy, gladness, and harmony of life.

The brain, courage, confidence and determination are not supported by poor, thin, vitiated blood. When the vitality of the brain is depleted there is nothing to back up the faculties or to buttress the ambition. They all drop to correspond with the vitality of the brain, which is only equal to that of the rest of the body.

While it is impossible to develop intelligence