PHYSICAL EDUCATION. u 







physical labor ; wealth removes the objective necessity of physical 

 exercise, but the subjective necessity remains ; millions of city-dwell- 

 ers, in their pursuit of artificial luxuries, stint their bodies in the nat- 

 ural means of happiness ; they increase their stock of creature-comforts 

 and decrease their capacity for enjoying them ; religious and social 

 dogmas pervert their natural instincts ; their children are crammed 

 with metaphysics till they forget the physical laws of God. 



These evils the inventors of gymnastics managed to counteract, 

 and, before we can hope to recover the Grecian earth-paradise, our sys- 

 tem of public education needs an essential and thorough reform. On 

 earth, at least, moral and physical culture should be as inseparable as 

 mind and body ; every town school should have an in-door and out-door 

 gymnasium ; the same village carpenter who takes a contract for a 

 dozen rustic school- benches should get an order for a horizontal bar 

 and a couple of jumping-boards ; every school district should appoint 

 a superintendent of gymnastics ; every town a committee of public 

 arenas : cities that can afford to devote h. hundred tax-free tabernacles 

 to Hebrew mythology might well spare an acre of ground for Grecian 

 athletics. Plato's Acaderaia and Aristotle's Lyceum were both gym- 

 nastic institutions, where the patricians of Athens spent their leisure 

 houi*s, and often joined in the exercises of the athletes. Our best citi- 

 zens should emulate their example, and help to eradicate the lingering 

 prejudice against the culture of the manly powers. A field-day, con- 

 secrated to Olympic games and the competitive gymnastics of the 

 Turner-hall, should be the grandest yearly festival of a free nation. 



In the mean time we must help our children the best way we can 

 by giving them plenty of time for out-door exercise, and providing 

 them, according to our means, with some domestic substitutes for the 

 gymnastic aj^paratus which, I trust, the next generation will find in 

 every village hall and every town school.* 



Children have a natural penchant for active exercises. Sloth is 

 one of the vices we should drop from our catalogue of original sins. 

 If a child were banished from the haunts of men, and left to grow up 

 as a wild thing of the woods, he would turn out a self-made gymnast, 

 though perhaps also in the original sense of the term, for gymnasium 

 and gymnastics were derived from a word which means naked. Na- 

 ture seems to deem the development of our limbs a matter of greater 

 importance than their envelopment, and clothes are gften, indeed, the 

 first impediment to the free exercise of our motive organs. The regu- 



* In 1825 Professor Beck opened in Northampton, Massachusetts, the first American 

 school where gymnastics formed a branch of the regular curriculum. He has found fol- 

 lowers, but, considering our progress in other directions, his wheat can not be said to 

 have fallen on a fertile soil. Taking Massachusetts, Ohio, and North Carolina as repre- 

 sentative States of their respective sections, it seems that at present (1881) an average 

 of three in every thousand North American schools pays any attention to physical edu- 

 cation. 



