TJNCHASTITY 237 



This tendency among civilized people is to be com- 

 bated by having greater attention given to health cul- 

 ture; to the training of the muscles by thorough and 

 systematic gymnastic exercise; to the connection of 

 manual-labor and manual-training departments with 

 our educational institutions ; and to the encouragement 

 of agricultural and other forms of muscular employ- 

 ment. The mind need not be trained less, but the body 

 more. Indeed, a better kind of mental discipline would 

 prove one of the most effective means of checking the 

 development of this morbid tendency. Self-control and 

 self-discipline should be cultivated from the earliest 

 period in the education of every child. 



It is indisputable that sexual vices are far less prev- 

 alent among those barbarous tribes who live much in 

 the open air and obtain their sustenance by such 

 arduous means as hunting and the gathering of the 

 meager products of the forest and the untilled soil, 

 than among civilized people; and it is also a fact that 

 among civilized people, sensuality is far more preva- 

 lent with the nervous, excitable classes— those who are 

 inferiorly developed physically, and whose occupations 

 are not laborious— than among the agricultural popu- 

 lation, and other classes whose occupation calls for 

 vigorous exercise of the muscles. The most effective 

 method of antagonizing vice among these classes, is 

 to improve their condition physically, and to give mus- 

 cular employments to antidote the tendency in their 

 constitutions by which they become dangerous to the 

 moral health of the community. 



