Keeping Fit All the Way | Page 6

concludes with the remark: "Some day we will give all American school children thorough physical training and health education. Why not commence now?"
FROM A FAMOUS PHYSICIAN'S NOTE-BOOK
Dr. S. Weir Mitchell says:
All classes of men who use the brain severely, and who have also--and this is important--seasons of excessive anxiety or grave responsibility, are subject to the same form of disease; and this is why, I presume, that I, as well as others who are accustomed to encounter nervous disorders, have met with numerous instances of nervous exhaustion among merchants and manufacturers.
My note-books seem to show that manufacturers and certain classes of railway officials are the most liable to suffer from neural exhaustion. Next to these come merchants in general, brokers, etc.; then, less frequently, clergymen; still less often, lawyers; and, more rarely, doctors; while distressing cases are apt to occur among the overschooled young of both sexes.
Here is a day's list:
Charles Page Bryan, former ambassador to Japan, died in Washington of heart failure at the age of sixty-one.
Judge Arthur E. Burr, Judge of Probate for Suffolk County, dropped dead in the court-house at the age of forty-eight.
Hiram Merrick Kirk, Municipal Court Justice, New York, died in the forty-seventh year of his age.
Lieut. William T. Gleason dropped dead in the railroad station, Salt Lake City, as he stepped from a railroad train, at the age of forty.
Indeed, it is not only the men of military age who drop off under this strain, but the very vital strong men behind the lines.
THE ROAD TO EFFICIENCY
It is an extraordinary thing that the people in this country, many of them coming from the most vigorous ancestry, should be willing to compress all their athletic enthusiasm into a very small period of their school and college life, and then to forget to take any exercise (except vicariously) until warned, sometime after forty, that Nature will exact a price for such folly. It is certainly a puzzle to understand how men can willingly slip into fatness and flabbiness or nervous indigestion, forget entirely what a pleasure physical vigor is, fold their hands contentedly, with the statement that they haven't time for physical culture, and so, gradually, by way of the motor-car and the dinner-table, slide into physical decadence and a morbid condition of mind and body. And yet three or four hours a week, less than an hour a day, with the assistance of fresh air and water, and within a sixty-or ninety-day period, will start these people on the road to recovered health and vigor. All that is necessary is to get the proper action of the lungs, of the heart, and of the skin, and, finally, of the digestion; then the results will follow fast.
A WINTER VACATION
The first time a good conservative New England business or professional man, who has worked hard all his life and who has attained a commanding position in the community, determines to break away and take a vacation in the winter--a thing he has heard about and sometimes wondered how other people could manage to do it--he meets with the surprise of his life. After boarding a train and traveling for twenty-four hours toward the South and sunshine, he begins to lose a little the feeling that he is playing "hookey" and is liable to be dragged home and birched. But he does wonder a little whether he won't have hard work in finding somebody to play with him. When, however, he disembarks from his train at his destination--we will say Pinehurst--he has already begun to realize, through noting the other bags of golf-clubs on the train, that possibly he will be able to get some partners. When he arrives at the hotel, although it is early breakfast-time, he is astounded at the number of people there, and he is inclined to think that he has happened upon an unusual week or that this is the one place in the South where golfers congregate.
By the time he has spent a day or two there and has found that, in spite of the three courses open, it is wise to post his time the day before or he is likely to kick his heels around the first tee for a couple of hours before he can get away, and when he looks over the crowded dining-room at night--well, he comes to the conclusion that most of the school have deserted and are playing truant, too!
THE GOSPEL OF FRESH AIR
A generation ago the people who preached the good gospel of fresh air were still viewed askance, although the new doctrine had begun to make some impression. The early settlers in this country lived an outdoor life perforce, and undoubtedly found all the excitement of a football game in fighting the Indians; consequently, they attained proper physical development. The descendants of these