Keeping Fit All the Way | Page 7

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 settlers still
retained a good deal of the outdoor habit, but in the third generation the
actual drift city-ward began. This meant the absence of incentives to
outdoor exercise, so far as life and the pursuit of happiness were
concerned. Hence, it became necessary to preach the gospel of fresh
air.
"Oh, the joy with which the air is rife," sang Adams Lindsay Gordon,
one of the early preachers of this doctrine, and to-day thousands and
tens of thousands are appreciating the truth of the saying. Not alone the
boy at school or college with his football, baseball, and rowing, but the
middle-aged man with his golf and tennis, and the old man tramping
through the woods with the rod and gun, as he used to do thirty years
ago, and as he will do to the end--all these know what fresh air means.
Sunshine, through the medium of golf, has come to the life of
thousands of middle-aged wrecks formerly tied to an office chair. No
one can estimate the number of lives, growing aged by confinement in
close rooms, by lack of exercise, and by the want of cheerful interest in
something beside the amassing of dollars and cents, that have been
saved and rendered happy through the introduction of this grand sport
whose courses now dot the country from Maine to California, from the
top of Michigan to the end of Florida.
Twenty years ago in this country a man who came to his office in a golf
suit would have been regarded as demented, to say the least. To-day the
head of the house in many a large business refuses to permit anything
to interfere with his Saturday on the links. And this means that he and
all the officers in the departments under him, instead of viewing with
concern the interest of the men in outdoor sports--their devotion to
baseball and football, to tennis, golf, and track athletics--are glad and
willing that the great outdoors should have a real place in their lives. It
is good business policy.
Something must make up to the later generations for the loss of the

open air and outdoor work which the exigencies of the olden times
demanded of our ancestors, and that something has come in the shape
of physical exercise. But golf and long vacations are for the
comparatively rich. They are makeshifts rendered possible only by
circumstances.
UNLEARNED LESSONS
If a man determined, because his horse or his dog showed exceptional
intelligence, that he would endeavor to develop that intelligence by
setting the animal at mental tasks, and so gave it only the exercise that
would come from moving about the room, and no fresh air or sunshine,
no road-work or hunting--well, we are all quite familiar with what the
result would be.
If a parent had a child who showed unusual mental precocity and
thereupon forced the brain of that child, with no outdoors, no fresh air,
no sunshine, and even to late hours, we all recognize that such action
would be criminal. Yet probably 50 per cent, of our best executives, in
their efforts to aid in the present emergency, are doing just what we are
ready to condemn in the hypothetical cases given above. Some of these
men, while still able to whip up their will into going on from day to day
with the same exhausting program, finally conclude that unless they
take a vacation they are going to break down. The doctor tells them so
and they know it. Whereupon they rush off for a week or ten days;
some of them enter upon an orgy of exercise, others relax into a
somnolent state of lying around and thanking their stars that they can
rest at last. They certainly do feel better and do improve, but they come
back to work merely to begin the same old vicious round. They have
had their lesson, but they have not learned it.

CHAPTER III
This is a young nation. It began with the great gods of Life, Liberty,
and the Pursuit of Happiness. And it