STUFFY ROOMS 383 



a shallow respiration, a disordered digestion and a slow rate of 

 metabolism. 



Many of the employments of modern days are detestable in their 

 long hours of confinement and monotony. Men go up and down in a 

 lift all day, and girls in the bloom of youth are set down in tobacco 

 stalls in underground stations, and their health and beauty there fade 

 while even the blow-flies are free to bask in the sun. In factories the 

 operatives feed machines, or reproduce the same small piece of an 

 article day after day. There is no art, or change, no pleasure in con- 

 trivance and accomplishment. The miner, the fisherman, even the 

 sewerman, face difficulties, changing risks, and are developed as men 

 of character and strength. Contrast the sailor with the steward on a 

 steamer, the drayman outside with the clerk inside who checks the 

 goods delivered at some city office, the butcher and the tailor, the seam- 

 stress and the market woman, and one sees the enormous difference 

 which a confined occupation makes. Monotonous sedentary employ- 

 ment makes for unhappiness because the inherited functional needs 

 of the human body are neglected, and education — when the outside 

 field of interest is narrowed — intensifies the sensitivity to the bodily 

 conditions. The sensations arising within the body — proprioceptive 

 sensations — come to have too large a share in consciousness in com- 

 parison with exteroceptive. In place of considering the lilies how 

 they grow or musing on the beauty and motions of the heavenly 

 bodies, the sedentary worker in the smoke-befouled atmosphere, with 

 the limited activity and horizon of an office and a disturbed digestion, 

 tends to become confined to the inward consideration of his own 

 viscera and their motions. 



Many of the educated daughters of the well-to-do are no less con- 

 fined at home; they are the flotsam and jetsam cast up from the tide 

 in which all others struggle for existence — their lives are no less 

 monotonous than the sweated seamstress or clerk. They become filled 

 with " vapors " and some seek excitement not in the cannon's mouth, 

 but in breaking windows, playing with fire, and hunger strikes. The 

 dull monotony of idle social functions, shopping and amusement no 

 less than that of sedentary work and an asexual life, impels to a 

 simulated struggle — a theatrical performance, the parts of which are 

 studied from the historical romances of revolution. Each man, 

 woman and child in the world must fin'd the wherewithal for living, 

 food, raiment, warmth and housing, or must die or get some other to 

 find it for him. It seems to me as if the world is conducted as if ten 

 men were on an island — a microcosm — and five sought for the neces- 

 saries of life, hunted for food, built shelters and fires, made clothes of 

 skins, while the other five strung necklaces of shells, made loin-cloths 

 of butterfly wings, gambled with knuckle-bones, drew comic pictures 



