HEALTH AND RECREATION. 787 



508 are scholars and children — the living capital of the next genera- 

 tion of men and of women. 



As we glance at these classes we quickly detect that what may be 

 called their vocations are extremely different ; that each class — with the 

 exception, perhaps, of two, the professional and the commercial, with 

 that part of the indefinite class which is composed of persons of rank 

 and property, and which approach each other — are as widely separated 

 in tastes and habits and inclinations as they are in labors and works. 

 Looking at the education of body and mind in these classes as a whole, 

 there is certainly little enough of symmetry. 



Among the representatives of these classes which are best able to 

 command the advantages of true recreation there is little sound attempt 

 to use the privilege in a refined and reasonable way. The persons who 

 have their time at command, and who belong to the most favored 

 division, are divisible into two groups : a group which does no work at 

 all that can bear the name of useful or applied labor, but which spends 

 all its waking hours at what it considers to be recreative pursuits, which 

 may be laborious, but must not be remunerative ; and a group which 

 labors industriously for the sake of return or reward, but which steals 

 from time of labor regular intervals in which to follow out certain of 

 the recreations which form the whole life of the first group, in strict 

 imitation of that envied group, and in hopeless neglect of any recreation 

 of its own better adapted to its real wants and best enjoyments. Each 

 of these groups sufi"ers from the course it follows. The representatives 

 of the first kind lose much, since they are for ever repeating the same 

 to them pleasurable or automatic activity. The second lose, because, 

 while they are ever repeating the same useful activity, they are only 

 relieving that activity by repeating day after day the same automatic 

 and imitative recreations. Thus both are subjected to what may be 

 called the automatism of recreation. The automatism of recreation is 

 bad in every sense, and it is specially bad in the present day, because 

 of the quality of it, as well as the limited quantity. There is no such 

 diversity of recreation as is wanted to keep the body in health by the 

 exercise of the mind. With one man the recreation is all taken out in 

 cards, with another in chess, with a third in billiards, with a fourth in 

 debate or gossip on some one persistent topic of discourse or argument, 

 and so on, for what may be called the in-door recreative life. Nor is it 

 much different with out-door recreative amusement. Some one par- 

 ticular amusement claims the attention of particular men, and to this 

 amusement the men adhere as if they had to live by it, and as if, in fact, 

 there were no other recreative pursuits in the world. 



This specialty of recreative pleasure or labor — for soon it becomes 

 labor — leads to consequences which are often of the most serious char- 

 acter. The man who undertakes the recreation at first as an enjoy- 

 ment, and indeed as a relaxation, is so absorbed in it that he strains 

 every nerve to be eminent in it, a professor of the accomplishment, with 



