HEALTH AND RECREATION. ■ 791 



because the recreation is special as a sometimes harmful recreation, but 

 because more persons are concerned in it just now than in aught else of 

 the same kind of recreative pursuit. 



There are many other so-called recreations which are even more in- 

 jurious to the feeble adolescent and to the enfeebled matured individu- 

 als, who seek to find symmetry of health in extreme recreation. Foot- 

 ball is one of these recreations fraught with danger. Rowing is another 

 exercise of the same class. Polo, while the fever for it lasted, was found 

 to be of similar cast. Excessive running and prolonged and violent 

 walking — in imitation of those poor madmen whose vanity trains them 

 to give up sleep and all the natural ordinances that they may walk so 

 many thousand miles in so many thousand hours — these are alike inju- 

 rious as ph^'sical recreations unless taken with the same discrimination 

 as is required by those who enter into the Volunteer movement. 



As we pass from the freer and wealthier classes of the community 

 into the less prosperous we find no marked improvement whatever in 

 any form of recreation. We begin, in fact, to lose sight of the recrea- 

 tion that ministers to either mind or body in a sensible and healthy de- 

 gree, and to see that which should be recreative replaced almost entirely 

 by continuous and monotonous labor. The idea of symmetry of function 

 and development between mind and body disappears nearly altogether; 

 so that, indeed, to mention such a thing would, in some of the classes 

 concerned, be but to treat on a subject unknown, and therefore, as it 

 would seem to them, absurdly unpractical. To tell a country yokel that 

 his body is not symmetrical in build, and that his mind has no kind of 

 symmetrical relation to his body, were druel, from its apparent satire. 

 Yet why should it be ? Why should ignorance and labor so deform 

 any one that the hope of a complete reformation, the hope of the consti- 

 tution of a perfect body and in it a perfect mind, should seem absurd ? 

 It is not the labor that is at fault. The labor is wholesome, healthful, 

 splendid ; it is a labor compatible with the noblest, nay, the most re- 

 fined of human acquirements. Why should it be incompatible with 

 perfect physical conformation of mind and body? It is not, indeed, 

 the labor that is at fault, but the ignorant system on which it is carried 

 out. 



There is much difference, in fact, between the three classes of the 

 community called the domestic, the agricultural, and the industrial, in 

 respect to the work, the recreation, and the resultant health pertaining 

 to each class. The domestic class as a whole is, by comparison with the 

 industrial, fairly favored. The members of it lead, it is true, a monoto- 

 nous life, and see often but little of the beauties of external nature, but 

 they find in the amusements they provide for those who are about them 

 some intervals of change which are, as far as they go, of service. More- 

 over, except in that part of the class which is engaged in disposing of 

 spirituous di'inks, and which pays a heavy vital taxation from the recrea- 

 tion springing out of that vocation, its representatives are not exposed 



