DESTRUCTIVE TENDENCIES OF MODERN LIFE 337 



stmction of parents and teachers in the rules of proper physiological 

 development. Kules for the development and classification of children 

 in the public schools of Chicago have, after much painstaking labor, 

 been pretty well worked out. These results should be collated and 

 compared with similar results obtained in other cities and good working 

 rules deduced from them for national application. Only a board of 

 skilled workers under national control would have the authority, the 

 influence and the means to formulate and apply such rules. 



~No doubt this proposition will meet with opposition from the stag- 

 nant elements of society, known as conservative, and from scientists 

 falsely so-called (being in truth pedants and the greatest hinderance to 

 all true progress). All thinking men will agree, however, that if 

 such an investigation did nothing else, it would tend to develop the 

 physical conscience and clarify the average conception of life. Could 

 people generally be convinced that over-indulgence in flesh food is one 

 of the principal causes, not alone of early decay and death, but of the 

 almost unquenchable human appetite for alcohol and narcotics, an 

 immense stride would have been made in human progress. And it is 

 extremely likely that of the $600,000,000 which this country is said to 

 spend annually in caring for its defectives and criminals, enough could 

 be saved in a few years to carry on such an investigation as we have out- 

 lined for a lifetime. ' Science is the only true charity and the only 

 true remedy.' Allowing degeneration, allowing intemperance, allow- 

 ing immorality, gluttony and ignorance to emasculate our youth, 

 poison the body politic, fill our penal institutions and, worst of all, 

 prevent the proper development of our men and women, is race suicide 

 on a scale not contemplated in ordinary family life, but multiplied by 

 millions, and surely, unless checked, leading to national destruction 

 and disintegration. The remedy is a proper solution of the so-called 

 common questions of life : the neglected body, the despised dietetics, the 

 irksome exercise must be studied by trained and accomplished experts 

 not clinicians, not school teachers, not moralists, not sanitarians in the 

 ordinary acceptation of the term, but specialists in humaniculture, 

 humanists in the true sense, and these great and simple truths, which 

 the Greeks mastered, must be learned over again in the light of modern 

 science (not pedantry), and taught to our children's children; then 

 shall be realized " that future where the highest art and most perfect 

 science will be those of the development of man's faculties and apti- 

 tudes to a degree of which the Greek civilization will afford an indica- 

 tion instead of an unattainable ideal." 



vol.lxx. — 21. 



