The spirit of the preceding address to the good members of the Unity
League organisation on the shores of beautiful Lake Geneva has been the
inspiring motive of the quest for scientific endorsement of Economic
Nutrition for the benefit of the present generation of children, and,
incidentally, of their elders. In Economic Nutrition lies protection
from sexual morbidity, alcoholic intemperance, bodily disease, savage
passions and all the brood of evil contamination and temptation. In
Economic Nutrition lie possibilities of physical and mental energy and
optimistic happiness such as the world has not been accustomed to in
the memory of history. Economic Nutrition is what children want to be
taught with their first indelible impressions, and the present great
movement of which this little book treats, for which it was first
responsible, and for which it is republished in a new and extended
edition, is expected to furnish authoritative knowledge relative to the
most Economic Nutrition, so that mothers and kindergartners may meet
the little waifs from the Creator on the threshold of this present life
with words of wisdom and examples of sanitary perfection, instead of
confronting them at once with the poison of ignorance relative to their
most important concern,--their own Economic Nutrition.
That the contentions uttered in "That Last Waif; or, Social
Quarantine," referred to in the Lake Geneva Address, are reasonable is
evidenced by the experience of Dr. and Mrs. Kellogg and their adopted
family of twenty-four waifs, the acquaintance of which has since been
made.
All of the altruists who have engaged in kindergardenry among the
neglected, Dr. Barnardo, Dr. Kellogg and the rest, are full of
confidence in the possibility and efficacy of a perfect quarantine as
outlined in "That Last Waif." It is an _Epicurean_ method of promoting
_Menticulture_, killing _Fearthought_, denouncing _Gluttony_, saving
that _Last Waif_, and attaining _Happiness_ through learning the
_A.B.-Z. of Our Own (Economic) Nutrition_.