Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

are, it seems to me, of the highest importance to prevent overcrowding and loss of life from famine. Even in our own country, where there is little or no overcrowding and where intercommunication between all parts of the land is so easy, we have much to learn. By our high duties on certain raw materials we prevent the building of ocean steamers or the buying of them from abroad. The result is we have given over most of our carrying trade to foreign nations; and, still worse, we have such a high tariff on steel railswhich can be made cheaper at home than in England, and at a good profit, too-that there can be no foreign competition, and then by means of trusts we limit production and keep the price so high that far less rails are used than otherwise would be, that far less men are making them, and many thousand less making tracks and laying down rails. The result is many of the least profitable roads are imperfectly constructed and accidents often occur. How many men, women and children have failed to survive, or have become feeble and diseased and will die or have become tramps, or locomotive perverts who might be employed in producing and laying down new roads or mending those which need repair, none of us will ever know.

Locomotion by means of artificial methods has been of almost infinite benefit to man in yielding those pleasures which come from visiting lands not our own, and learning the habits and customs of other people. Indirectly this promotes health and enjoyment and also human progress. Many of those changes of opinion which have been beneficial may be traced directly to intercourse thus promoted. If such intercourse has also carried evils as well as blessing, as the spreading of the use of intoxicating drinks among temperate nations, this is to be regretted. Everything beneficial may become a source of harm, as is the case when primitive races are subjected or destroyed by foreign invasions only possible by artificial means of locomotion, to gratify the wishes of those who claim to be more enlightened.

PHYSICAL CULTURE.

I pass on to another part of my subject-the train.

ing and development of the organs of locomotion and the whole muscular system by means of special physical culture.

The muscular system of man and of animals was not developed by special training, but by exercise in supplying those wants which were imperative. Youthful sports were indeed always the spontaneous outbursting of a surplus of energy in all races, probably even in primitive men, if they were at all like their primitive ancestors, the ape; but these spontaneous exercises were, first, I believe, reduced to a system and applied to the perfection of the body by the Greeks. Their course of education embraced two very important branches-music and gymnastics. Music had a direct relation to mental culture, and embraced the liberal arts and sciences, including architecture, sculpture, language, poetry, eloquence, philosophy, and history. Gymnastics, on the other hand, had relation to the perfection of the body, both in form, and in grace and perfection of movement. The gymnasia of the ancient Greeks were their schools, and hardly an important city or town but had one or more of them. The most beautiful and healthful part of the city was chosen as a site. The grounds embraced often ten or more acres, with groves for philosophic study and reflection, enclosures for out of door exercise in pleasant weather, halls for lectures, baths, anointing with oil, boxing, running, wrestling, ball playing, quoits, and many other games. A special teacher had charge of the training, and adapted it to the youth. From an early age the boys were taught music and grammar and the easier games and exercises. From sixteen to eighteen they spent most of their school hours in practicing their exercises; at eighteen they were fit for war, for leisure, for the study of philosophy, or entered the field of professional athletes and devoted their lives to prize running, wrestling or fighting. The professional athlete did not live to be old. The intense strain of excessive bodily development weakened his hold on life and made his brains dull and heavy. Those who devoted their lives to philosophy or science, or art, took only the lighter and more graceful exercises, producing a more har

monious development of the whole man, and lived often to old age. The Greeks had a saying that "it takes a philosopher to live long and well." Plato spoke of the athletes as a sluggish set of men with dubious health and short-lived. "A more elegant kind of exercise," says he, "is required for our military wrestlers, who ought to be wakeful, to see and hear acutely, to be able to endure changes of food, heat and cold, and not to fail in health."

In Sparta the training was more for war. The girls had equal bodily training with the boys, often in coeducation with them. The object was to produce strong mothers who could bring into the world strong children to become soldiers, able to defend the government from external foes. While it no doubt produced masculine women, who often forced their way into politics to no advantage to themselves or the state, yet, if we may believe history, the training was of great value, promoting both health and national longevity. In Athens the training was less severe, and inculcated manly bearing, grace and bodily vigor. No means were thought so valuable in preserving and restoring health as exercise. I have often thought that if the Grecian method of bodily development and the use of gymnastics had prevailed in Christian civilization, the more Arabic system of drug medication, partly at least, the outgrowth of chemistry, would not have gotten such a hold on western races, but we should long ago have had what we are now beginning to have, a system of hygienic medication. Perhaps it is stating it too strongly to say that we should have had a medical system free from drugs; but as ninetenths of our medication is by drugging the sick, often with poisons, often also with useless nostrums, and less than one-tenth by means of hygienic medication, SO might not the figures have been reversed; may they not yet be reversed and we finally have a system ninetenths hygienic and preventive treatment and not more than one-tenth devoted to internal remedies, the action of which we still know very little?

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, the early Christians, with all their zeal and earnestness, had not the scientific spirit of the Greeks, and they were too

'much absorbed with their souls to care for their bodies and train them for the highest service of the mind. The long series of centuries of the history of primitive Christianity in which the body was almost despised and neglected, produced most disastrous effects. We are now coming back to the Grecian idea, and it is to be hoped the results on the future will be of the highest value. Nearly every Young Men's Christian Association has adopted, imperfectly, it is true, their ideas of physical culture, and while they do not yet do their work as well, they are doing much to save and perfect the bodies of the young.

It is a long story to go into, and I can only say here that the physical education in Greece had two effects, one good and one evil. The good effect is seen in the fact that it aimed to produce perfect men and women for the higher duties of life-for philosophers, statesmen, soldiers, scholars, poets, artists, sculptors. It is generally believed that sculpture among the Greeks was only possible in the high degree in which it existed because of the physical perfection of the people. The love of beauty was so conspicuous in the Greeks that they would never have cared to perpetuate in marble an imperfectly developed and homely set of men and women. Their perfect bodies inspired the artists to produce an equally perfect art.

an im

The effect of this physical training-especially among the Spartans--on national survival would require a volume to fully illustrate, but that it did have portant bearing on this subject no one can doubt. Men in Sparta lived for the state, and were trained with the severest rigor to endure calmly and passively every hardship, to feel perfectly at home amidst perils and trials. "Come home with your shield, or on it," were the words every Spartan mother gave to her son when he left home with his shield to fight for Sparta. All the Spartans, both the wealthy and the poor, submitted to the same rigorous discipline. The love of home which we so highly prize was perhaps less to them than to us; the love of the state everything. No doubt that was a serious error, the effects of which were felt later.

The necessity of good power of locomotion is important in war for attack and retreat. If an army is beaten, it must fly before its pursuers. We read of Socrates once as a soldier in the ranks of a retreating army carrying on his back a wounded friend. Without locomotive ability in a high degree in him, we might not have had his influence on the world as a moralist. Still this experience has its ludicrous side, and happening to-day would have furnished material for many cartoons.

EVILS OF ATHLETICISM.

The evil side of Grecian physical culture grew out of athletics for the sake of contending in games, for prizes, or in other words, for exhibition. The games of contestants, the boxing, the wrestling, running, and Grecian athletics were in the end a positive evil. The gymnasia became finally the place, not for perfecting men physically and mentally, but for idle loungers, for pleasure, for dissipation. Little by little these evils crept in as wealth increased and the young had leisure; and finally, the degeneration of Greece and her national downfall grew, in part at least, out of the misuse of the means devised for her survival.

A somewhat brighter picture is found in Germany and also in Sweden. In the early part of the century Europe was overrun by the armies of Napoleon, and Germany was a great sufferer, for German soil was the battlefield for all Europe. The German people had not been trained and developed in the arts of war by special physical culture, and they were unable to drive out the foreign foes that were despoiling their land. In the emergency arose Frederich Ludwig Jahn, a pupil and disciple of Johan Christoph Fredrich Guts Muths, whom we may call the father or grandfather of modern physical culture, who formulated a system of physical training for the people which, crude as it was, enabled them to expel the French. He excited unbounded enthusiasm and the spirit of patriotism, and established throughout Germany Turnhallen for training. which accomplished wonders. It was to him that we owe the revival of modern physical culture in Germany; and indirectly also in other countries, even

« AnteriorContinuar »