HEALTH AND RECREATION. 783 



heavy and gross that half the power, which might otherwise go off in 

 vivacity or nerve or spirit, is expended in the physico-chemical labor 

 that is demanded for keeping the body warm and moving and living. 



To these drawbacks is added the unequal struggle for existence, the 

 partitioning off of our people into great classes, the millions of whom 

 are obliged to work from morning to night, compared with the thou- 

 sands who are at liberty to make some change in their course of life ; 

 the millions of adults who may be said to be tied to some continuous, 

 monotonous round of labor, until the whole body lends itself to the 

 task with an automatic regularity which the mind follows in unhappy 

 and fretful train, with little hope for any future whatever on earth that 

 shall bring relief. 



From whatever side we look upon this picture it seems at first sight 

 to present an almost insoluble problerii, when the conception of mixing 

 recreation with work, so as to make all work recreative, is considered. 

 Amono- the masses there is no true recreation whatever, no real varia- 

 tion from the daily unceasing and all but hopeless toil ; nay, when we 

 ascend from the industrial and purely muscular workers to the majority 

 who live by work, we find little that is more hopeful. There is no true 

 recreation among any class except one, and that a limited and happy 

 few, who find in mental labor of a varied and congenial kind the diver- 

 sity of work which constitutes the truly re-creative and re-created life. 



We get, in fact, a little light on the nature of healthful recreation 

 as we let our minds rest on this one and almost exceptional class of 

 men of varied life and action of a mental kind. They come before us 

 showing what recreation can effect through the mere act of varying the 

 labor. The brain-worker who is divested of worry is at once the happi- 

 est and the healthiest of mankind — happiest, perchance, because healthi- 

 est ; a man constantly re-created, and therefore of longest life. 



Dr. Beard, of New York, who has recently computed the facts bear- 

 ing on this particular point, gives us a reading upon it which is singu- 

 larly appropriate to the topic now under consideration. He has reck- 

 oned up the life-value of five hundred men of greatest mental activity : 

 poets, philosophers, men of science, inventors, politicians, musicians, 

 actors, and orators ; and he has found the average duration of their 

 lives to be sixty-four years. He has compared this average with the 

 average duration of the life of the masses, and he has found in all 

 classes, the members of which have survived to twenty years of age, 

 the duration to be fifty years. He, therefore, gives to the varied brain- 

 workers a value of life of fourteen years above the average. B3' a later 

 calculation, relating to a hundred men belonging, we may say, to our 

 own time, he has discovered a still greater value of life in those who 

 practice mental labor, seventy years being the mean value of life in 

 them. Thereupon he has inquired into the cause of these differences, 

 so strange and so startling, and has detected, through this analysis, as 

 I and others have, a combination of saving causes, the one cause most 



