832 REPORT—1904. 
the rising generation to appreciate from childhood the nature of those influences 
which injure physical and mental health. Having regard to the fact that much 
of the degeneracy, disease, and accident with which medical men are called upon 
to deal, is directly or indirectly due to the use of alcohol, and that a widespread 
ignorance prevails concerning not only the nature and properties of this substance 
but also its effects on the body and the mind, we would urge the Board of Hduca- 
tion of England and Wales, the Scotch Education Department and the Irish 
Education Authorities to include in the simple hygienic teaching which we desire, 
elementary instruction at an early age on the nature and effects of alcohol. We 
gladly recognise (1) the value of the teaching on this subject given in some 
schools in Ireland and in a proportion of the schools of Great Britain, by means 
of reading primers, moral-instruction talks, &c., and (2) the excellence of the 
occasional temperance lessons provided in certain schools by voluntary organisa- 
tions ; but until the four Central Educational Authorities of the United Kingdom 
include this subject as part of the system of National Education, it appears to us 
that the mass of the pupils must fail as at present to receive that systematic 
teaching of hygiene and of the nature and effects of alcohol which alone we con- 
sider adequate to meet the national need. Finally, we would venture to urge the 
necessity of ensuring that the training of all teachers shall include adequate 
instruction in these subjects.’ 
This petition, coming, as it does, with all the weight of the medical profession, 
as the expression of their experience and convictions, is, to my mind, one of the 
most important educational documents which have been published in our time, 
and it can hardly be disregarded without incurring the charge of folly. 
It may be worth while to set it for a moment side by side with the fashionable 
cult of athleticism, as bringing into relief our curiously unscientific inconsistency 
in such matters. 
On the one hand, in our absent-minded way, we have allowed these genera- 
tions of town-dwellers, to say nothing of rural villagers, to grow up and live under 
insanitary conditions which inevitably produce a physically degenerate, enfeebled, 
and neurotic race of men and women. 
On the other hand, in the upper and middle classes, we have been sedulously 
cultivating the taste for physical exercises, outdoor life, athletics, and sport, think- 
ing nothing of such importance as the development of the body, admiring nothing 
so much as bodily prowess; carrying all this to such an extent that a natural and 
wholesome use of athletic exercise has been fostered into a sort of fashionable 
athleticism, with all its parasitic professionalism, possessing both soul and body. 
And the result has been curiously significant ; at one end of the scale neglect 
of the rudiments of sanitation, the loss of the corpus sanum, at the other end the 
idol worship of athleticism, the depreciation of the intellectual life, and the loss of 
the mens sana. 
Are we not then in some danger of drifting into the ways of the Greeks, not in 
their best days but in their decadence, and of the Romans under the demoralising 
influences of the Empire ? 
The Greeks, as we are constantly reminded, in the great period of their creative 
influence, found nothing so absorbing as the things of the mind; a pre-eminent 
characteristic of their life was their love of knowledge, their fine curiosity, their 
enjoyment of the things of the imagination and of thought. It has been noted that 
what specially conciliated an Athenian voter was the gift of a theatre ticket; and 
this is a very instructive and significant fact when we bear in mind that the 
theatre was the great teacher of religion, morals, poetry, patriotism, all in one; 
that it combined the influences of Westminster Abbey, the plays of Shakespeare, 
and the heroic achievements of the race; whereas to an ordinary English voter 
these things are too often only as caviare to the general. 
Tf so, our education has before it the task of doing what can be done to alter 
this; and from the Greeks we may derive both lessons and warnings. It was in 
the days when this decadence was beginning that their excessive admiration of 
the professional athlete, what we might call their athletic craze, called forth the 
bitter jibes of Euripides, and his impressive warnings and exhortations to admire 
