790 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



be on a level with younger and athletic men, and I have been obliged 

 to hear of the signal and natural failure of the eflFort. I have heard of 

 the attempts to meet the failure by the tempting offer and too willing 

 acceptance of what are called artificial stimulants to give temporary 

 support, and I have been obliged to discover in persons so overtaxed 

 and so over-stimulated a certain. heavy excessive draw on the bank of 

 life, an anticipation of income which, in the vital as surely as in the 

 commercial world, is the road to a premature failure and closure of the 

 whole concern. 



There are many who will agree with me, I doubt not, on this point ; 

 there are many men, and there are more women — for wives and moth- 

 ers are far more observant and wise than husbands and fathers on these 

 points — who will be able to bring their experience to bear in confirma- 

 tion of that which I have spoken ; and these will agree that to put men 

 of different ages and of different states of constitution and habits in the 

 same position for recreation ; to trot them all through the same paces ; 

 to make them all wear the same dress, walk or march the same speed, 

 carry the same load, labor the same time, move the limbs at the same 

 rate ; that to construct one great living machine out of a number of such 

 differently built machines is of necessity an unnatural and, in the end, 

 a ruinous process. There are some, however, who, while admitting so 

 much, will put in a plea for the younger members of the community. 

 They will insist that the younger men, the men who are from nineteen 

 or twenty up to twenty-nine or thirty, may with advantage go through 

 the recreation of training after the Volunteer fashion. The case is 

 much stronger on behalf of this argument, but even in the respect named 

 there requires a great deal of discrimination. A race of strong men 

 may be bred, and a weak race may, by gradual development, be raised 

 into a strong ; but a weak man, born weak, can, through himself, be led 

 a very little way into strength ; while during the process of training he 

 can most easily be broken into utter feebleness, so that the last of the 

 man may be worse than the first, Hencej in training the weak into 

 strong through any form of recreation, mental or physical, but specially 

 physical, there must be a singular discrimination. In this instance of 

 Volunteering as a mode of progress in physical health for the young 

 there are dangers that ought to be avoided with religious care. To ad- 

 vise a weakly youth of consumptive tendency and feeble build, or one 

 having some special proclivity to rheumatic fever, heart-disease, or other 

 Avell-defined hereditary malady, to compete with other men of the same 

 age and of athletic nature, in the same recreative exercise, is to deceive 

 the youth into danger. To force such a one into violent competitive 

 exercise, and tax him to the same degree of vital withdrawal day after 

 day, or week after week, is to subject him all but certainly to severe, if 

 not fatal, bodily injury. 



I have selected the recreative exercise of Volunteering as a case for 

 illustration of an important lesson, and I have made the selection, not 



