and Rational Gymnastics. 75 
become crippled in body and mind by the ignorance of 
their parents respecting the most necessary and simple 
means of preserving health? How many more lives might 
be saved, and human beings preserved from disease, 
poverty, and crime?” 
These introductory observations will be sufficient to give: 
you some idea of the general views I entertain on the 
subject of physical training. I beg you to understand 
that one main feature of the system is the non-interfering 
with the development of the human. body. 
At present people think of training soldiers when they 
are twenty years old. That is very hard work. They can 
be drilled to do certain things; but if you wish to train 
them to be more than mechanical instruments, it is de- 
sirable they should be able to place the body under the 
control of the will, and in order to produce this general in- 
fluence of the will upon the body, it is necessary that the 
education of the body should go hand in hand with that 
of the mind from the earliest school period—I mean from 
the time they begin to go to school; and this training must 
be continued through the different stages of their growth, 
and then we shall be able to have soldiers in a much 
shorter time ; because if I give a man a general power and 
influence through his will to act upon his body, what he 
has to do becomes very easy to him; but if you take a 
man whose mind has never been accustomed to act upon 
the body, the task is very difficult. Therefore, physical 
training is, at the same time, a mental training, and the 
means which we use to develope the body are, at the same 
time, means to develope certain of the faculties of the 
mind, because a certain amount of order, exactitude, energy, 
_ quickness, and a certain degree of mutual assistance, will 
be produced if we train body and mind mutually. 
Before I begin to speak of the second or active part of 
physical training, by which I mean rational gymnastics, I 
wish to point out that there are certain agents, without 
which we are not able to live, agents of which people in 
general do not think so much as they ought—viz., air, food, 
drink ; to each of these special attention is to be paid. 
Another indispensable agent is to have acertain amount 
of warmth. We produce, through our own natural func- 
tions, warmth in ourselves, besides which we have artificial 
means of retaining this warmth by the aid of clothing. 
Inasmuch as military men suffer very much, when on the 
march, from being improperly shod, I have thought it 
