STRENGTH.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Bodily vigor is the basis of mental and physical health. Strength is
power, and the instinctive love of invigorating exercise manifests
itself in the young of all but the lowest brutes. The bigot who
undermines the health of his children by stinting their outdoor sport
as “worldly vanity,” and “exercise that profiteth but little,” is
shamed by animals who lead their young in races and trials of strength.
Thus the female fox will train her cubs; the doe will race and romp
with her fawn, the mare with her colt. Monkeys (like the squirrels of
our northern forests) can be seen running up and down a tree and
leaping from branch to branch, without any conceivable purpose but the
enjoyment of the exercise itself; dogs run races, young lions wrestle
and paw each other in a playful trial of prowess; even birds can be
seen sporting in the air, and dolphins on the play-fields of the ocean.
In nearly all classes of the vertebrate animals the rivalry of the
males is decided by a trial of strength, and the female unhesitatingly
accepts the victor as the fittest representative of his species.
Normal children are passionately fond of athletic sports. In western
Yucatan I saw Indian girls climb trees with the agility of a
spider-monkey, and laughingly pelt each other with the fruits of the
Adansonia fig. The children of the South-sea Islanders vie in aquatic
gymnastics. Spartan girls joined in the foot-races of their brothers,
and by the laws of Lycurgus were not permitted to marry till they had
attained a prescribed degree of proficiency in a number of athletic
exercises. Race-running and wrestling were the favorite pastimes of
young Romans in the undegenerate age of the republic; and, in spite of
all restraints, similar propensities still manifest themselves in our
school-boys. They pass the intervals of their study-hours in
competitive athletics, rather than in listless inactivity, and brave
frosts and snowstorms to get the benefit of outdoor exercise even in
midwinter. They love health-giving sports for their own sake, as if
instinctively aware that bodily strength will further every victory in
the arena of life.
The enthusiasm that gathered about the heroic games of Olympia made
those festivals the brightest days in the springtime of the human race.
The million-voiced cheers that hailed the victor of the pentathlon have
never been heard again on earth since the manliest and noblest of all
recreations were suppressed by order of a crowned bigot. The rapture of
competitive athletics is a bond which can obliterate the rancor of all
baser rivalries, and still unites hostile tribes in the arena of pure
manhood: as in Algiers, where the Bedouins joined in the gymnastic
prize-games of their French foemen: the same foemen whose banquets they
would have refused to share even at the bidding of starvation. In
Buda-Pesth I once witnessed a performance of the German athlete
Weitzel, and still remember the irrepressible enthusiasm of two
broad-shouldered Turks who crowded to the edge of the platform, and,
with waving kerchiefs, joined in the cheers of the uncircumcised
spectators.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The “survival of the fittest” means, in many important respects, the
survival of the strongest. In a state of nature weakly animals yield to
their stronger rivals; the stoutest lion, the swiftest tiger, has a
superior chance of obtaining prey; the stouter bulls of the herd defy
the attack of the wolves who overcome the resistance of the weaker
individuals; the fleetest deer has the best chance to escape the
pursuit of the hunter.
A state of civilization does only apparently equalize such differences.
The invention of gunpowder has armed the weak with the power of a
giant; but the issue of international wars will always be biased by the
comparative strength of sinew and steadiness of nerve of the men that
handle those improved weapons. In the last Franco-Prussian war the
French were favored by an undoubted superiority of arms, but they were
utterly beaten by a nation whose sons had devoted their youth to
gymnastics. The arms of the Gothic giants were of the rudest
description: hunting-spears and clumsy battle-axes; but those axes
broke the ranks of the Roman legionaries, with their polished swords
and elaborate tactics. For the last two thousand years the wars that
decided the international rivalries of Asia, Europe, and North America
nearly always ended with the victory of a northern nation over its
southern neighbors. The men of the north could not always boast a
superiority in science or arms, nor in number, nor in the advantage of
a popular cause; but the rigor of their climate exacts a valiant effort
in the struggle for existence, and steels the nerves even of an
otherwise inferior race. “Fortis Fortuna adjuvat,” said a Roman
proverb, which means literally that Fortune favors the strong, and
which has been well rendered in the paraphrase of a modern translator:
“Force begets fortitude and conquers fortune.” Nor is that bias of fate
confined to the battles of war. In the contests of peace, too, other
things being equal, the strong arm will prevail against the weak, the
stout heart against the faint. Bodily strength begets self-reliance.
“Blest are the strong, for they shall possess the kingdom of the
earth,” would be an improved variation of the gospel text. The Germanic
nations (including the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon) who have most
faithfully preserved the once universal love of manly sports, have
prevailed against their rivals in the arena of industry and science, as
well as of war.
An American manufacturer, who established a branch of his business at
Havre, France, hired American and British workmen at double wages,
maintaining that he found it the cheapest plan, since one of his
expensive laborers could do the work of three natives. In the seaport
towns, even of South America and Southern Europe, a British sailor is
always at a premium. American industry is steadily forcing its way
further south, and may yet come to limit the fields of its enterprise
only by the boundaries of the American continent. From the smallest
beginnings, a nation of iron-fisted rustics has repeatedly risen to
supremacy in arms and arts. Two hundred years before the era of Norman
conquests in France, Italy, and Great Britain, the natives of Norway
were but a race of hardy hunters and fishermen. A century after the
battle of Xeres de la Frontera, the half-savage followers of Musa and
Tarik had founded high schools of science and industry. And, as the
fairest flower springs from the hardy thorn, the brightest flowers of
art and poetry have immortalized the lands of heroic freemen, rather
than of languid dreamers. The same nation that carried the banners of
freedom through the battle-storm of Marathon and Salamis, adorned its
temples with the sculptures of Phidias and its literature with the
masterpieces of Sophocles and Simonides.
Physical vigor is also the best guarantee of longevity. Nature exempts
the children of the south from many cares; yet in the stern climes of
the higher latitudes Health seems to make her favorite home; in spite
of snowstorms and bitter frosts the robust Scandinavian outlives the
languid Italian. In spite of a rigorous climate, I say, for that his
length of life is the reward of hardy habits is proved by the not less
remarkable longevity of the hardy Arab and the manful Circassian, in
climes that differ from that of Norway as Mexico and Virginia differ
from Labrador. Men of steeled sinews overcome disease as they brave the
perils of wars and the hardships of the wilderness; hospital-surgeons
know how readily the semi-savages of a primitive borderland recover
from injuries that would send the effeminate city-dweller to the land
of the shades. Toil-hardened laborers, too, share such immunities. On
the 25th of March, 1887, Thomas McGuire, the foreman of a number of
laborers employed at the night-shift of the Croton Aqueduct, fell to
the bottom of the pit, a distance of ninety-five feet, and was drawn up
in a comatose condition, literally drenched in his own blood. At the
Bellevue Hospital (city of New York) the examining surgeon found him
still alive, but gave him up for lost when he ascertained the extent of
his injuries. Both his arms were broken near the shoulder, both thighs
were fractured, his skull was horribly shattered about the left temple
and frontal region, six of his ribs were broken and their splinters
driven into the lungs. There seemed no hope whatever for him, and,
after the administration of an anesthetic, he was put in a cot and left
alone to die. To the utter surprise of the attending surgeon, the next
morning found the mass of broken bones still breathing. His fever
subsided; he survived a series of desperate operations, survived an
apparently fatal hemorrhage, and continued to improve from day to day,
till about the middle of June he recovered his complete consciousness,
and was able to sit up and answer the questions of the medical men who,
in ever increasing numbers, had visited his bedside for the last three
weeks. As a newspaper correspondent sums up his case: “His strong
constitution had repulsed the assaults of death, till finally the grim
monster went away to seek a less obstinate victim.” And, moreover, the
exercise of athletic sports lessens the danger of such accidents: a
trained gymnast will preserve his equilibrium where a weakling would
break his neck.
According to the mythus of the Nature-worshiping Greeks, the darling of
Venus was a hunter (not a tailor or a hair-dresser), and the gift of
beauty is, indeed, bestowed on the lovers of health-giving sports, far
oftener than on the votaries of fashion. Supreme beauty is
country-bred; the daughters of peasants, of village squires, of
fox-hunting barons, have again and again eclipsed the galaxies of court
belles. Country boys have won hearts that seemed proof against the
charm of city gallants. “I have seen many a handsome man in my time,”
says old Mrs. Montague in Barry Cornwall’s “Table Talk,” “but never
such a pair of eyes as young Robbie Burns kept flashing from under his
beautiful brow.” “Women will condone many a moral blemish in a suitor,”
says Arthur Schopenhauer; “they will pardon rudeness, egotism, and
intellectual poverty; they will forgive even homeliness sooner than
effeminacy. Instinct seems to tell them that in the result of marriage
a mother’s influence can neutralize any defect but that.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The history of Antinaturalism is the history of a persistent war
against the manlier instincts of the human race. Buddha and his
Galilean disciples considered the body the enemy of the soul. According
to their system of ethics, Nature and all natural instincts are wholly
evil; the renunciation of earth and all earthly hopes is their price of
salvation, and the chief endeavor of their insane zeal is directed
against the interests of the human body. The gospel of Buddha
Sakiamuni, and its revamp, the “New Testament” of the Galilean messiah,
abound with the ravings of an anti-physical fanaticism as unknown to
the ethics of the manly Hebrews as to the philosophy of the
earth-loving Greeks and Romans. The duty of physical education and
health-culture was entirely ignored in the gospel of the life-despising
Nazarene. “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” was the ideal of the
Grecian philosopher. A world-renouncing mind in a crushed body, was the
ideal of the Christian moralists. The sculptors and painters of the
Middle Ages vied in the representation of cadaverous saints,
hollow-eyed devotees, and ghastly self-torturers. Physical training was
tolerated as a secular evil indispensable for such purposes of the
militant church as the hunting of heretics and the invasion of
Mussulman empires; but its essential importance was vehemently
disclaimed; the superior merit of sacrificing health to the interests
of a body-despising soul was constantly commended, and the founders of
the monastic orders that superseded the pagan schools of philosophy did
not hesitate to enforce their dogmas by aggressive measures; the
wretched convent slaves had to submit to weekly bleedings and
strength-reducing penances; their novices were barbarously scourged for
the clandestine indulgence of a lingering love for health-giving
sports—wrestling in the vacant halls of their cloister-prison, or
racing conies on their way to their begging-grounds. The Olympic
festivals were suppressed by order of a Christian emperor. The fathers
of the church lost no opportunity to inveigh with rancorous invectives
against the pagan culture of the manly powers, “so inimical to true
contriteness of spirit and meek submission to the yoke of the gospel.”
The followers of Origenes actually practiced castration as the most
effectual means of taming the stubborn instincts of unregenerate boys.
Their exemplar, who had recommended that plan for years, came at last
to suspect the necessity of eradicating a germ of worldliness in his
own mind, and proceeded to accomplish that purpose by emasculating
himself. The anti-physical principle of European Buddhism manifests
itself likewise in the fanaticism of the Scotch ascetics who raged
against the scant physical recreations of a people already sufficiently
afflicted by climatic vicissitudes and the parsimony of an indigent
soil. It still survives in the bigotry of those modern zealots who
groan at sight of a horse-race or wrestling-match, and would fain
suppress the undue worldliness of ball-playing children. Manly pastimes
were banished from the very dreams of a world to come; and while the
heroes of Walhalla contest the prizes of martial sports, and the guests
of Olympus share in the joyful festivals of the gods, the saints of our
priest-blighted heaven need the alternative of an eternal hell to enjoy
the prospect of an everlasting Sabbath-school.
Trials of strength and of skill,
Rewarded by festive assemblies,
Feasts in the halls of gods, where the voice of the muses
Answered in songs to the ravishing lyre of Apollo,
quotes a German poet from the Vulgata, “when suddenly,” he adds, “a
gaunt, blood-streaming Jew rushed in with a crown of thorns on his head
and a huge wooden cross on his shoulder, which cross he dashed on the
banquet table of the appalled gods, who turned paler and paler till
they finally faded away into a pallid mist. And a dreary time then
began; the world turned chill and bleak. The merry gods had departed;
Olympus became a Golgotha, where sickly, skinned, and roasted deities
sneaked about mournfully, nursing their wounds and chanting doleful
hymns. Religion, once a worship of joy, became a whining worship of
sorrow.”
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
But Nature had her revenge, and the despisers of their own bodies
became so truly contemptible that in comparison the rudest barbarians
of antiquity seemed respectable men. The neglect of physical exercise
avenged itself in loathsome diseases, the perverted instincts exploded
in vices; the monkish self-abasers became caricatures of manhood:
bloated, whining, mean, and viciously sensual wretches, the
laughing-stock of foreign nations and the curse and disgrace of their
own. Physically, mentally, and morally, the earth-despising convent
drone represented the vilest type of degeneration to which the manhood
of our race has ever been degraded, and the enforced veneration of such
monsters, as exemplars of perfection, has perverted the ethical
standards of mankind to a degree for which our present generation is as
yet far from having wholly recovered. The love of athletic recreations
is still smirched with the stigma of the Middle Ages; “respectability”
is too often mistaken for a synonym of pedantry and conventional
effeminacy; parents still frown upon the health-giving sports of their
children; vice still sneaks in the disguise of saintliness and
world-renouncing aversion to physical recreations.
The degeneration of many once manful races has reached an incurable
phase: the listless resignation to physical abasement and decrepitude.
Earth has spurned her despisers; millions of priest-slaves in southern
Europe have lost the inheritance of their fathers, and have to till the
soil for aliens and despots. The arbitrament of war has made them taste
the lowest dregs of national humiliation; the life-long worshipers of
whining saints appealed in vain to the God of Battles, and were forced
to eat dust at the feet of the despised Infidel and heretic. The ships
of the Spanish Armada were consecrated by a chorus of ranting priests
commending them to the miraculous protection of heaven; and heaven’s
answer came in the blast of the hurricane that buried their fleet in
the depths of the sea. The same nation once more invoked the aid of the
saints for the protection of an armament against the great naval powers
of the nineteenth century. The ships were ceremoniously baptized with
the most fulsomely pious names: “The Holy Savior of the World,” “Saint
Maria,” “Saint Joseph,” “The Most Holy Trinity,” and sent forth in full
reliance on the protection of supernatural agencies. But in the
encounter with Nelson’s self-relying veterans the sacred bubble at once
collapsed. St. Joseph’s impotence howled in vain for the assistance of
the Holy Ghost. The Savior of the World could save himself only by a
shameful flight, and the Most Holy Trinity succumbed to a decided
surplus of holes.
E.—REDEMPTION.
In the work of physical regeneration Nature meets the reformer more
than half-way. Our children need but little encouragement to break the
fetters of the fatuous restraint that dooms them to a life of physical
apathy. They ask nothing but time and opportunity to redeem the coming
generation from the stigma of unmanliness and debility. Physical and
intellectual education should again go hand in hand if we would promote
the happiness of a redeemed race on the plan that made the age of
Grecian philosophy and gymnastics the brightest era in the history of
mankind. Physical reform should be promoted by the systematic
encouragement of athletic sports; every township should have a free
gymnasium, every village a free foot-race park; by prize-offers for
supremacy in competitive gymnastics wealthy philanthropists could turn
thousands of boy topers into young athletes. We should have athletic
county meetings, state field-days, and national or international
Olympiads.
Educational ethics should fully recognize the rights of the body. We
should admit the unorthodox, but also undeniable, truth that an upright
and magnanimous disposition is a concomitant of bodily strength, while
fickleness, duplicity, and querulous injustice are the characteristics
of debility. We should teach our children that a healthy mind can dwell
only in a healthy body, and that he who pretends to find no time to
take care of his health is a workman who thinks it a waste of time to
take care of his tools.