Chapter III: Part 3

The next move in the direction of peace came, as the world rather well knows, through the present Czar, Nicolas the Second, who on ascending the throne in 1894, proclaimed that Russia would rule in the interests of peace and would cultivate the arts of it. In 1898 followed the first call for a World Peace Conference, and in 1899 came another circular with a similar object.

But it is out of the kind heart of Muscovy, and from the troubled, humble and penitent soul of Russia that the real peace movement of her land has arisen. For many centuries calamities have been pouring upon her plains, profusely pouring--drought, famine and invasions without number; now Rurik and his Northmen to start the empire out of its prehistoric lethargy; their dynasty of conquering blood still sharing in the rulership of the land to-day; now the Tartars, remnants of whom with their high cheek bones are still visible in the Baltic provinces; particularly and always and ever poverty beyond description; poverty, disaster and conquest, like triple demons to humiliate the soul of Russia and keep her dumb for many centuries, except for the beauty of her unending song.

And out of these conditions of life has grown the peace morality that is native to the Russian people; out of their sorrows and their conquered plains, out of their broken hearts too, although the economic genesis of it all is very apparent.

The Russian people's Russia has ever been under the overlords heel, downtrodden years without number, and yet it is a land which has never produced a system of military tactics and training--forever dependent for these creations upon her neighbors; a land which has produced scarcely one great naval or military commander who to-day holds a place in history as do those of other nations; a land whose people have been usually led to slaughter like sheep by Northman or Teutonic or Polish generals; whose armies have never been noted for their great campaigns, and always have been poorly drilled, managed and fed, and never yet successful in any foreign wars. Surely from such a land as this, no widespread war-morality or world-conquering legions could come.

In fact the very reverse has come to pass: the philosophy of Slavophilism has arisen in Muscovy, yet not so much arisen as it has developed with the Russian soul, not as a thing apart, but as a quality thereof, blossoming somehow with all other Russian things, out of the primitive Scythian darkness. The rebellious spirit having been crushed out of the generations since, what is left but non-resistance? Yet in these latter years a resisting spirit, nursed and suckled largely in western Europe, has falsely made it appear that all Russia was in arms, storming with chaotic unity at the church, the state and the army, deluging their ancient customs with the destructive and re-creative might of radicalism. Far and wide of the truth is this! Let no one think the vast heart of Russia has changed! Only the few have cast away the ancient quiet; only the few have the modern consciousness instead of the medieval, theocratic one; only the few are not at heart Slavophiles in feeling and in morality.

This philosophy existed long in the national or social mind before it was crystallized into public doctrines, and exists even yet largely in its more primitive unworded or instinctive form, although it was Peter the Great who unconsciously awoke the latent and then unexpressed Slavophilic feelings and moralities when he, like a civilizing Pied Piper, charmed the chieftains of industry of Western Europe to follow his trail into Muscovy, his "Empire of Little Villages," and there regenerate them.

Therefore at about the end of the seventeenth century in Russia, the "dumb silent centuries" gradually became articulate in expressing their opposition to all things western. This is the heart of Slavophilism, and no one can truly fathom the Russian soul before understanding its philosophy. It is the Muscovite theory of the simple life, still crying out against the Great Peter's work and recalling the devotees of western culture to its idealization of medieval, theocratic, autocratic Russia.

Despite this reaction, however, it has a great meaning, a tender beauty, and a message of depth and power for our western world. Primarily Russia is a peasant and an agricultural land, and there is a colorless monotony in her vast plains. Indeed land and people are alike; as in the average peasant there is patience, resignation and submission, so there is in the very land itself. Open and prostrate it lies beneath the torrid sun of the south, and the arctic winds of the north; subdued and downtrodden for centuries, it and its people have always been at the mercy of ruthless men and rainless winds.

Thus passive endurance has become one of the saving qualities of the Russian's soul. The peasant's nature is one that has few wants and little rebellious power. The Greek church of the simple gospel is his and a government of the Czar's will. His power of self renunciation is one which in Slavophilic thought gives him true liberty. Therefore ask the followers of this doctrine, what need is there of the constitutional liberties of the west, or its republics or limited monarchies, or its differences in ecclesiastical faith and structure? Slavophilism declares that Russia has the only true freedom, faith and brotherhood, which other lands sadly lack. In addition she has the ancient and splendid heritage of the communal land system, wherein the inherent justice of the Russian peasant's heart is shown by his voluntary division and re-division of the land among his brothers at stated times.

What need therefore, Slavophilism asks, for the degenerate justice of the west? None! Away with Europe then!--the Europe of competition and gruesome factories! The Europe of destructive forces, of greedy land grabbers, of capital and labor wars, where society is held together, not as in Russia by the ties of affection, brotherhood and communal interest, but only by money and greed, and where free thinkers, atheists and materialists abound, whose lives and thoughts would unsettle the holy, orthodox feelings of Russia, disturb her ancient conscience and poison her humility with murmurings of discontent and rebellion.

Away with the books of the west, too! And its agricultural implements! Wooden ploughs instead of chilled steel! Outdoor work and not indoor prisons called factories! Peasants working for centuries beneath the uncanopied sun, and on the floors without walls, will not let doors and brickwork thumbscrew their souls in confinement thus! Indoors awhile in winter will they labor, but spring airs shatter the moralities of the time-clock and away to the fields they rush; in the spring to sow and sing, in the summer to sing again and at the harvest time too, and then to plait the bearded stalks into wreaths and crown the maidens with sheaths of corn; the hymns for the "death of winter" and the "birth of spring," marriage songs and funeral dirges and chants of olden times well intermingled with the labor of their hands.

Herein the poetry of agricultural, peaceable Russia clashes with the prosaic efficiency of the west, the efficiency of commercial wars, strikes and class struggles which peasant Muscovy has known so little.

And again, Slavophilism, with its theory of successive civilizations, culled perhaps from the philosophy of Hegel, each civilization superior to its forerunner, comes to show us a vision: the gradual displacement of one type of society by another, but continuing what is best in the preceding until nothing except what is good remains and universal peace results, thus portraying the displacement of national civilizations by universal ones, from which ultimately an idealistic world policy will result, and the federation and peace of men.

Some Slavophiles saw even in Peter's work a process of progressing from nationality to universality. In his time there was the same yearning toward its peaceful ideal. The "Old Russia" party wanted Peter to renounce war and conquest. Alexis, his own murdered son, worked with this element which was very largely representative of the nation. To them, St. Petersburg, then a new and growing capitol, was typical of change, unrest and falsity; Moscow was in their hearts the only capital, typical of Russia's old comfort and quiet. Many nobles antagonized Peter, but he swept them aside, imprisoning them or sending them to the gallows. Like Russia's slight resistance to Rurik and others, and to the Tartars, so was her feebleness before Peter the Great, who was himself, however, by no means an accomplished military leader, but an enlightened barbarian, dealing with a people whom writers and observers declare to be endowed with conspicuous traits of humility, scarcely found in the Christian nations of the western world.

Russian fiction represents its people in the same way. Unaggressive characters, who talk and think but do not act, fill its novels; they dream of the great age of the "Universal Idea" that shall come for all and regenerate the "rotten west," where "rationalism is the original sin"; the typical west that Slavophilism condemns--the west of the struggles between the rulers and the ruled; between Scripture and tradition and the upper and lower classes. The Slavophile idea, in theory at least, leaves no room for this. Christian love and humility and peasant communes, where rationalism, strife and rebellion are unknown, must be instituted in the west; then the "Universal Idea" of Russia will create Millennial times. This was the "Messianic hope of Slavophilism," and perhaps is yet to a great degree destined in the minds of its devotees to give the last feature to the development of the world, so that the love and feeling of the east would appease the discord of the west, diluting its discipline and its logic with true religious intuition and humility, and eventually the idealized relationship of autocracy for the Czar and self-government for the people--the old system so rudely strained by Peter the Great--would permeate the ruled and rulers of the world.

Here then is Slavophilism! And pacific Russia--the heart and soul of her, claiming this to be the true ethical and spiritual ideal for her people, and censoring her upper class, with its foreign culture, materialism, and infidelity, as being the only real traitor to this saving morality of the ancient regime.

Among the prominent advocates of this philosophy might be mentioned, first, Constantine Aksakoff, Russia's Rousseau, who in the middle of the nineteenth century, was a virtuous propagandist of the doctrine. He earnestly, even religiously, preached the return of Russia from the allurements of western Europe, unto her own theory of national salvation, declaring that "the social order of the west is on a false foundation" and that Slavophilism would offset its degeneracy, if only Russia would free herself from the false class leadership for whose origin the Great Peter stands the convicted sponsor! Thus Slavophilism, under the leadership of Aksakoff, instead of leading forward with the great liberal movement that came after the Crimean War, resulting finally in the emancipation of the serfs, would lead backward to the stagnant hours of medieval Russia. Then there were no German words to disfigure the Russian language! Then there were no German divisions of rank among the officials to strangle life by their formality. No, none of these, nor the disturbing importations of Peter; in Aksakoff's variation of the gospel, the Russians are the "beyond men" and need them not. Thus before Peter's reign all was Slavophilic!--a religion of the simple Christian gospel, a church considering itself the only true ecclesia, a government of the Czar's will, a life of passive humility; creating freedom of conscience and speech for the peasants, and freedom of activity and legislation for the rulers, unknown in modern corrupted Russia!

And thus was old peaceable-hearted Muscovy of the past centuries pictured as the metropolis of true political and individual morality.

Herzen, too, an able pamphleteer in revolutionary things, preached something similar, crying from his pulpit at home or in exile, that Russia would solve all her problems and lead the human race by the simplicity of the Slavophile ideal. His early and rabid westernism was greatly tempered on contact with the west. Disillusion and disgust overcame him. The mercantilism of the bourgeoisie there drove him into Aksakoff's fold, and he too thereafter found faith alone in the "regenerative power of Russia," and her system of the mir, the central sun of the Slavophilic state, the village commune, self-governing and self-contained. And then from that, this was to ensue: the whole world made of village communes as in Russia, perhaps even their log cabins too, and fresh mud to go with them on their walls! But this did not deter the vision of these evangelists. The commune was to be indefinitely extended; national and international ones were to be organized, all self- governing, and then would follow as the night the day, universal peace wherever these communes were found.

This is the Utopia Russia has given to the world to stand beside Plato's, or Sir Thomas More's or Morris's or Bellamy's. This was the dream of pacific Pan-Slavism.

Dostoievsky himself is of it, and is luminous not with a mere facet flash of its philosophy but with the whole orb of it. To him the Russians "are more than human, they are pan-human."

Count Tolstoi too must be listed with these preachers. He, making his own shoes and cutting his own and the peasants' grain, lived it, showing how he thought the world's work ought to be done. What were factories or the culture of the west to him in later years--Shakespeare or no Shakespeare? Destructive ideals of life. Competition, money and land greed, self-assertion--all things that are the anthitheses of Slavophilism--he shunned; mocking the palsied heart and poisoned ideals of the west, and indeed of the "upper class" section of his own land as no other Slavophile did. And following its teaching, he journeyed through self-renunciation to freedom and communal life, after repentance for his wanderings, expiation and regeneration.

Dostoievsky, on the other hand, reached this philosophy largely by being born to it among the humble people who lived it. Melancholy-minded by nature--a sort of a Russian Dante but living in actual infernos and purgatorios, Siberia and prison cells, he came at last to worship his fellow countrymen and their ideals as almost nothing else in heaven or earth, and bowed down before them "as the only remnant left of Christian humility, destined by Providence to regenerate the world." Here is Slavophilism in a fervid extreme. "The Down-trodden and Offended," "Memoirs of a Dead House," "Crime and Punishment," "Poor People,"--these, the titles of his novels, show the predilections of his own soul. He died in the mystic frenzy of this enthusiasm.

Here then, in this philosophy and in the lives of these men, is something of the soul of Russia, beautiful in its humility, yet not so humble that it is not ambitious to embrace the world in the folding arms of its peace, its communal government and its morality. Pan-Slavism of this nature is the only kind that in truth can ever come from Russia. Pan-Slavism of the military sort, with musketry, bribery and all other diabolic black arts, miscalled government, rests on such a slim foundation that it need be but little apprehended.

It was this brotherly humble soul of Russia that greatly helped to put an end to the Russo-Japanese war: not merely failing finances and lack of transportation. The feeling of a kindly people for their own and a neighboring race caused widespread mismanagement, opposition and wholesale desertions from the army, among both the officers and the men. The Romanoff family and official Russia caused the conflict, but human Russia, humble and poor, was a great factor in its conclusion.

There is no doubt, however, that a certain number of Slavophiles are addicted to the military mania, and this form of their belief is more dangerously reactionary than its ordinary phase. Many of these belong to the bureaucratic caste. Official Russia holds aloft the eagle; human Russia the dove. Official Russia leads the anti-Jewish massacres; human Russia is very little responsible for pogroms. Ignatieff, "Father of Lies," a bureaucrat of the military Pan-Slavic breed, about 1882, began the worst persecutions against the Jews in the last generation, and possibly Pobiedonosteff, the late procurator of the Holy Synod, was the worst offender in this one. The peaceful feelings of the masses of the people, however, do not sanction these outbreaks, and Slavophilism of such a sort is not the philosophy of the Russian heart, no matter how many pogroms may be enumerated.

It is therefore to human Russia that one must look for the true feelings of the people; to their faith and deeds, to the humility of their devotions, and prostrations before their numberless shrines and ikons, to their religious ceremonies in the open fields for huge detachments of the army, to the thousands of their yearly pilgrims to Jerusalem, to their superstitions, their poverty and long-suffering, all of which attest innate passive endurance and non-resistance, and show their kind of Slavophilism, which all in all, is much more than "mere reverence for barbarism."

The war-time excitement in their cities seemed characteristic of this national soul: "Russia is the Mother of Servia" was the street cry of the marching throngs. It might be added that the word mother, "matushka," is a prevalent one in expressing their feelings. They call their greatest river the "Mother Volga." Conquering Rome said "Father Tiber" and the native warriors of this continent called the Mississippi the "Father of Waters." The difference in these appellations shows the tender quality of the Russian soul, whose ardent sympathies in July, 1914, were greatly aroused by the spectacle of a large nation attacking a small one, notwithstanding whatever may be said to justify that deed.

Finally, however, let it be added, that the one thing that will recreate Russia in the image of the west, is capital. Once let the vast sums that have invaded Muscovy be put, not to the autocratic purpose of the official rulers, but into factories, mines, city subways and transportation of all kinds, irrigation, canals, agricultural implements and to other productive uses, then capitalistic Russia will stand forth shorn of the Slavophilic simplicities of non-resistance and humility. Labor wars, practically unknown hitherto, yet now beginning, will occur in much greater number and the peasant class, still unified, will be torn asunder by differences in wealth and interests; the middle class, now very small, will grow to large proportions, and many destructive forces will come upon the land which has hitherto mocked western Europe because of their presence there.

The many centuries of peasant unity, with its beauty of brotherhood, affection and communal interests, will come to an end under such a new regime. Already competitive forces are dissolving communism in land, and many of the old beauties of Russia are disappearing. Capitalism will bring with it much turmoil and strife, unhappiness and death, but also the dawn of brighter hours; newer and better cities, cleaner water, better food, houses and clothes, and after the stress of its first attack is over, and Russia has evolved laws and means to control and socialize the invader, it may be that the old simplicities and beauties of life will return, and a greater and holier Russia will arise, still able to teach and aid in the regeneration of the rest of the world.

PHYSICAL TRAINING AS MENTAL TRAINING

BY DR. J. H. McBRIDE

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

THE first duty of a people is to provide for the health of its children. The possible human value of any country fifty years ahead depends chiefly upon what is done by and for its children. They are the future in the making.

History seems to justify the statement of Professor Tyler[1] that conquering races have been physically strong races, and that nations have failed when they became degenerate.

[1] Growth and Education," J. M. Tyler.

Dionysius, speaking of the advantage of virility in a nation, said,

It is a law of Nature common to all mankind, which no time shall annul or destroy, that those who have more strength and excellence shall bear rule over those who have less.

This law applies equally to individuals. Skill, cunning and reason play their part, but the animal quality of endurance is always back of these and is often decisive in a contest.

Darwin said he had difficulty in applying the law of the survival of the fittest to the facts of the destruction of Greece until it occurred to him that in this instance the strongest was the fittest. Civilized people's have been destroyed by ruder races that were physically superior.

The children that are now in our schools will take to adult life such foundation as heredity has furnished, with the equipment that society may care to add. We of this day have no greater obligation than to prepare these children mentally and physically for the duties that maturity may bring. Man did not escape the physical necessities of the body when he became civilized; the advantages of health are as great to-day as when our forebears lived in tents. Very few of the primitive man's activities are left; what he did regularly and from necessity we do incidentally, and usually for sport, and yet the demands upon the energies of man have not been lessened, they have only been changed in form.

Our educational authorities, though in many instances interested in physical development of the young, have not given the subject the important place in their program that it deserves. This is not wholly due to indifference, but largely to their ideals that were derived from classical-ascetic standards.

In the medieval ideal the human body was animal and sinful, to be despised and repressed. The mind was said to be the spiritual element in man, representing the immortal part of his nature, and therefore was the only part worthy of attention in an educational system. From the fall of the Roman empire to the later nineteenth century this ideal dominated education.

The medieval universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, provided only for mental training. Their education was intended for those who were to follow the professions or to become scholars or gentlemen of leisure. Education was not intended to prepare the great mass of men for the every-day work of life.

While only indirectly related to my subject, it is interesting to recall that there was in this country in the early nineteenth century much opposition to the establishment of common schools for the masses. It was claimed that those who belonged to the working classes did not need to be educated. Our own colleges and universities were originally founded on the old classical-ascetic model, so that the spirit of the medieval period survived in the educational plan of this country. It is only in recent decades that these institutions have begun to depart from the older, formal, classical methods that made education a privilege of the few, the average man being deprived of the advantages of the training that he needed. Because of this the humble millions of men and women who wove and spun, and fed and housed the world were left out of the educational scheme.

Some years ago a London weekly paper, which speaks for the conservative class of England, in discussing certain suggested innovations in English higher education, said that the great merit of education at Oxford and Cambridge was that it was "absolutely useless." By this it was probably meant that the education was for a chosen few, was not intended to prepare men for the practical work of life and was essentially and only an intellectual and cultural training.

The change of attitude that is seen in our day is due chiefly to two great discoveries: the re-discovery of the human body and its relation to our mentality and the discovery of the mind of the child and youth. We have found that man is an animal who graduated from caves and dugouts and to whom even barbarism was a lade and great achievement. That the human body was made by the experiences of that rude life, and that since then we have made no change in it except to stand on two feet. Neither have we added one nerve cell or fiber to our brains since the day when the cave was home and uncooked food the daily diet.

The conception of man as an animal has led to a study of him as such. Educators as a class now concede that the physical man must be considered as an essential part of their scheme, that the brain is an organ of the body among other organs, and is subject to the same laws and influenced by similar conditions.

The influence of the mind upon the body is a commonplace of psychology, but the influence of the body upon the mind is of equal importance, though less frequently emphasized.

Whatever one's theory of the nature of mind, it must be considered in relation to the brain as the organ of its expression. The mind has, too, a broader base than the brain, for every organ of the body has some share in the mental functions. Every physician knows that physical disease lowers the quality of the thinking and, with the exception of a few geniuses like Darwin and Leopardi, it makes impossible intellectual work of a high order. Disorders of the internal organs rob the brain of nourishment and weaken it, and by obtruding their morbidness upon it they batter down its resistances and lower the thinking power.

Though we can never know the history of man's origin, the lives of the child and of the wild man help us to understand something of the order of racial development. All the higher mental faculties grow in the child as they grew in the race--out of impulse, instinct, feeling; and from infancy to maturity we recapitulate mentally and physically the early human-making stages, short circuiting in twenty years the race-process.

The life of physical activity that the child leads develops and coordinates the brain and the muscular system. In this way the great motor functions are organized in the brain and become part of the physical basis of mind.

The older education that trained the intellect exclusively, without reference to the practical demands of life or the needs of the body, was inadequate in that it ignored the law of thinking and doing. It is true that there is much to its credit, as many fine spirits have testified. They at least survived it.

Stanley Hall says "we think in terms of muscular movement," and this expresses the most important single fact in the mature mentality. That the mind is largely constituted of memories of muscular movements is basic in development.

The muscles are the special organs of volition, the one part of the body that the mind can directly command and act on. The muscles are preeminently the mind's instruments, the visible and moving part of its machinery. They are thought carriers, and during the growth period their functional activities are organized into the mental life. This is why "we think in terms of muscular movement," and why muscular training supplies a natural need of the developing mind.

The normal boy says little or nothing of what he thinks, but much of what he is doing or intends to do. He has the motor mind, the instinct for doing things by which he builds the brain and body. It is nature's way of laying the foundation in the individual as by the more tedious process of evolution she laid it in the race. The mental development of the normal infant is indicated by the increasing accuracy and delicacy of muscular coordination. The feeble-minded child very early shows its mental defect in the clumsy use of its muscles. Because of the functional relation of the voluntary muscles and the mentality, physical training is in a large degree mental training. When by such training we give dexterity to muscles of the growing person we are making possible better mental development; that is, because of this relation of the mind to action there is a direct mental discipline in the thought-out processes of physical activity. If, then, we make physical development a part of our educational process, we are taking advantage of race tendencies, we are starting the individual as nature started the race; we are laying the foundation in the individual as it was originally laid in the race; we are building as the race built.

Exclusively intellectual training may be sufficient for the genius or for the few who have great initiative and intellectual self-confidence, but for the great mass of boys and girls this training is not sufficient. It does not prepare the young for the kind of work that three fourths of them will have to do. We are now beginning to recognize this and through manual training, vocational guidance, etc., we are teaching boys and girls how to do things, and this, too, has the additional merit of being, in a measure, physical training.

Educators, until recently, have, in emphasizing the paramount importance of mental training, lost sight of the needs of the body. Their classical ideals and formal methods made dead languages, mathematics, philosophy etc., the school diet of boys whose normal hunger was for action, and for learning by doing.

Sir William Hamilton, who wrote fairy tales in metaphysics for a generation of Scotchmen, placed these lines over the doorway of his lecture room.

In earth there 's nothing great but Man;
In Man there 's nothing great but Mind.

This sounds well, but it is poor philosophy. There is much in earth that is great besides man and much in man that is great besides his mind. The older type of metaphysician with his staggering vocabulary and his bag of "categories" has now chiefly a historic interest. In the modern view the interdependence of mind and body is a fundamental fact of life. As science reveals the physiologic marvels of the once despised body, the latter grows in our respect, for we find that its seeming humble functions are intimately related to our highest powers. Sir William's couplet gives a hint of the dominance of the classical method of his day. It overemphasized the importance of reason and too often converted the youthful mind into a rag bag of useless information. The educators of that time and since have thought more highly of human reason than experience justifies. With their medieval bias for a world of will and reason, they drove the young with the whip and spur of emulation toward what to them seemed the one possible goal, intellectual achievement.

We exaggerate the share that reason has in conduct. In the history of the race, which is epitomized in the life of every individual, reason was a late outgrowth of feeling, passion, impulse, instinct. It was these older faculties that ruled the life of the primitive man who made the race, and it was through them that the race gradually rose to reason by what Emerson would call the "spiral stairway of development."

These functions of impulse and instinct dominate the life of the child and they are only a little less potent in the conduct of us grownups. Much of what we call reason is feeling, and much of our life activities are due to desire, sentiment, instinct and habit, which, under the illusion of reason, determine our decisions and conduct. Some one has said that reason is the light that nature has placed at the tip of instinct, and it is certainly true that without these earlier, basal faculties reason would be a feeble light. During the growing period these are specially strong, and the important thing is that they be guided and organized in relation to the needs of maturity. In combining mental and physical training we are in some measure furnishing this guidance, doing intentionally what nature did originally without design.

In the uncivilized state the stress of life was chiefly physical. The civilized man has to a large degree reversed this old order, in that the use of the body is incidental in his work, the stress being placed upon the brain. He piles his life high with complexities and in place of life being for necessities, and they few and simple, it is largely for comforts which we call necessities, and Professor Huxley has said that the struggle for comforts is more cruel than the struggle for existence.

This stress which is put upon conscious effort in civilization places a new and severe tax upon the brain. It intensifies and narrows the range of man's activities; it causes him to specialize and localize the strain to a degree that may be dangerous. It is certainly true that every man has his breaking strain, and there is nothing that will raise the limit of endurance like a strong and well-developed body.

The Italian physiologist, Mosso, showed by an ingenious device that when a person lying quite still was required to add a column of figures, blood left the extremities and flowed toward the brain. Any emotional state or effort of thought produces the same result. This demonstration that we think to our fingers' ends suggests the importance of a strong body as a prompt support in mental work.

All our work, mental as well as physical, is a test of endurance, not a test that is spiritual and non-material, but even in the sphere of the mind it is plainly animal and physical. Thinking is primarily a physical process and draws upon the vital stores of every organ. The energy that makes clear thinking possible depends largely upon the vigor of the body, and to the extent that this fails, the brain functions suffer. Therefore, any work, mental or physical, will be better done and more easily done if the body is strong. Other things being equal, the intellectual work of the strong man will be better done than similar work by one of equal talent, but who is not strong.

Big muscles are not necessary in physical development. Many people are not designed for big muscles, and any attempt by them to produce a heavy, massive development may do harm. What is wanted is vigor, skill, muscular readiness and a reawakening of the old associations of thought and action. Such training goes further than thought and action, for it reaches all the organs and adds immensely to the vital capacity and working power of the individual.

The play instinct of the child is as old as the race, or older, and is a vitally important factor, not only in physical development, but also in mental development. In its destructive and disorderly activities the child shows the later adult forces in the formative stage. Old instincts and movements that were once self-preservative and of serious meaning to a wild ancestor reappear in the play of children, and, utilized wisely, may under new form become a valuable possession of the adult. There is a great big man, in fact, several possible men, inside every boy. Through his running, jumping, fighting, swimming, through impulse, instincts and emotions he is seeking the man that is in him, and it is by this turbulent and experimental course that he finally comes to the order of maturity.

Every boy is a vitally coiled up set of springs pressing to be released. Race-old energies are struggling in him for expression, and play is the normal way to satisfy the great demand. The child may miss some important things and yet get on, but it can not, without severe and lasting harm miss the instinctive activities of play.

In play and games the young are re-enacting these old muscular coordinations and developing mind and body on the old foundation. The boy's love of outdoor sports and the adventures of hunting are significant. Those ancestors of ours who hunted and fished and shaped with care their arrow heads were developing a manual skill and thinking power that we inherit. We use our muscles for more varied and possibly more finished purposes, but it is through the patience and practise of their rude lives that we possess the delicate uses of the hands and the finer dexterities of the mind.

The boy who goes whistling to the fields, or hunts, or fishes, or swims, is unconsciously reaching out toward later life and is preparing for serious and bigger things.

The growing formative period of life is the time for good physical development. Whatever is gained and fixed then is permanent, as it becomes a part of the physiological habits of the individual. The years before twenty decide the future energy stores, and the capacity to endure. Every function enlarged, every gain of power, is additional storage room for energy, to be drawn upon in the coming days of adult stress.

Good physical development not only gives strength and skill in the use of the body, but develops a physiological habit of surplus power that may be called quantity of energy. Life is not alone in quality, in delicacy of adjustment, in accuracy, in fineness of feeling; it is also in quantity. The poet who, with frail physique and feeble pulse, sits in his quiet retreat and puts his fine fancies into the rhythms of verse has quality. But in the stress and rivalry of life that awaits the majority of men, there is a need for quantity of energy, such as enabled a Washington or a Caesar or a Napoleon or a Wellington to shoulder his way through difficulties. These men combined quality with quantity and this combination may make, and often does make, the life of masterful achievement. The quantity of energy in us average men may make the difference between success and failure.

Many men fail in life for lack of staying power, for lack of that kind of endurance that is furnished by having power in reserve.

The strong, confident person who has strength to spare, reserves of energy, does his work easily and without friction. Half the timidities and indecisions of men are chargeable less to lack of ability than to lack of the physical vigor, the QUANTITY of energy, which is the driving power of character. In all the contests of life an important element in success is the ability to endure prolonged stress, to have the reserve energy that can be drawn upon and utilized as a driving force. This power is not alone necessary in the emergencies, the "short hauls" of life, but also in the long hauls that spread the strain through greater periods. Many of the failures of life are due as much to lack of ability to meet prolonged stress as to lack of experience or intelligence. Men of moderate ability but with great powers of endurance often succeed, while men of greater talent fail for lack of the ability to endure strain.

The man with a weak body and without the self-confidence that surplus energy gives is liable to be of uncertain judgment. Such a man in the presence of a problem requiring quick decision, doubts and hesitates and stands shivering on the brink of action while hastening opportunities pass him by.

Much of the loose thinking of our time is undoubtedly due to poor educational drill. In fact the failure of the schools to teach pupils how to apply the mind and how to think is one of their common reproaches. Inability to use the mind effectively is also frequently due to a lack of vigor and physical stamina. A person with poor digestion, or under-developed body, or weak circulation has of necessity a badly nourished brain. Such a brain, unless it belongs to a genius, will do poor thinking.

The mentally trained person who is also physically strong has the combination that puts his powers at easy command. He can be joyously busy doing the impossible because the doing of it has been made easy by training.

How much native power there is in all of us that for want of proper training or sympathetic encouragement never comes to maturity! How many of the finer qualities of character that, for want of a kindlier climate of cheerful companionship and wise direction, failed to mature and now lie dead in us! Very many people are only partly alive. A large part, and in some, the best part, is dead. The capacity they show is probably only a small share of a fine inheritance which, not knowing how to use, they allowed to die.

We have an instinctive liking for people who are strong and healthy. They appeal to us by their robustness and their confident display of energy. We do not now need the big muscles that were once necessary in wielding spear and battle-axe. We need, however, as much as the race ever needed well-developed bodies and habits of health.

It is not difficult for us to see that sports and games and play help to physical development, but it is not so plain that they may be made to develop the best qualities of character.

It is a fact, however, that all the important elements of character are tried out in games and sports. Enthusiasm, self-confidence, the adventurous spirit, alertness, promptness, unselfishness, cooperation, quick judgment--all these have their training and discipline on the game field. They comprise those fundamental native qualities that have gone to make humanity what it is. The young should have this training, and, if of the right kind, it may be made to contribute to the making of the best kind of character. The same quickness and accuracy of judgment that enable a boy to win a point in football may in later life be used to win a battle or save a business venture. Beyond this, there is of course gained the strong body that makes work easy and stress less difficult to bear.

Hall calls attention to the fact that two generations ago, Jahn, the great builder of German physique, roused the then despairing German nation by preaching the gospel of strong bodies. He created a new spirit in Germany, and the whole nation was aroused and seized with an enthusiasm for outdoor games and sports, and there arose a new cult for the body. His pupils sang of a united fatherland and of a stronger race. The Germans are in the habit of reminding us that it was about one generation after Jahn that the German Empire was founded and Germany became a world power.

Every argument for the physical training of boys applies with equal force to girls. Women need to be physically as strong as men. No race will remain virile and progressive unless both the fathers and mothers have the physical stamina that produces healthy, vigorous offspring. In this age, when women are going out into the world to compete with men it is highly important that they be physically strong if they are to stand the stress successfully. It was from rough barbarians, the rude war-loving Teutonic men and women described by Tacitus, that the Anglo-Saxon race inherited those splendid qualities of mind and body that have made their descendants masters of seas and continents.

It has been objected that gymnastics and field sports make girls coarse and mannish. The exact opposite has been found to be the case. It has been observed in colleges that when young women are properly led, their sports, in place of making them mannish, have a marked refining influence. They care more for correct posture because this is made one of their tests in athletic sports. They develop better manners and a new sense of pride in their appearance. They soon learn to avoid slang, loud talking and boisterous behavior. In the University of Chicago where they have excellent training, many of the girls have said that they came to have a new sense of dignity and to care more for their personal appearance.

They also develop the finer elements of character, a cooperative spirit, obedience to commands, patience, self-confidence, a spirit of comradeship, a democratic attitude and an appreciation of good qualities in others wherever found. All of these esthetic, social and moral qualities, woven into the texture of the growing character, and with the vigorous health that the physical training brings, are the best contribution to the making of the most effective type of the womanly woman. All games and sports and athletics for the young should therefore make for refinement and esthetic development.

The state needs now, and will always need, men and women who have sound bodies and abounding energy.

The harsher phases of the human struggle may pass and wars may cease, but the old contests of races, nations and individuals will continue under other forms.

As the race grows older life will become more largely mental. The increasing complexity of human relations and the more delicate adjustments that these relations require will bring a new and finer social order that will make higher demands upon reason.

While there is no evidence that experience or time or training will ever change the structure of the brain, it is probable that we have as yet but imperfectly utilized our mental possibilities. Stratton says:

Out of the depths of the mind new powers are always
emerging.[2]

[2] "Experimental Psychology and Culture," George M. Stratton.

Back of the mental life, and making it possible, are the energies of the body, the functioning of the animal in man, which in the brain are changed to the higher uses of the mind. The ability to execute, to act effectively, to do and keep doing, to do the work of the professional man, the banker, or the scientist, all this is primarily physical, and from top to bottom of man's activities the physical test is applied. With the mental and emotional strain of civilized life goes the physical strain which is the other half of the struggle, and which now and always is both mental and physical. The Greeks recognized this unity of mind and body twenty-five hundred years ago and their results remain unmatched by any race.

They saw that the thought-out movements of physical training resulted in mental training and this law of mental development through physical training was a fundamental principle in their educational plan.

The nation that will again make this an ideal will produce a finer race of men, and other things equal, will excel in all that makes a people great.

EDWARD JENNER AND VACCINATION

BY PROFESSOR D. FRASER HARRIS, M.D., D.Sc.

DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY, HALIFAX, N. S.

WE are so exceedingly apt to take our blessings as a matter of course that at the present time a large number of us have quite forgotten, and some of us have never known, what a terrible disease smallpox is and from how much suffering national vaccination has saved us. But even many of us, who may not be included amongst those who know nothing of smallpox, do come within the group of those who know next to nothing of the life and work of Dr. Edward Jenner. A number of persons think he was Sir William Jenner, physician to Queen Victoria.

An infectious or communicable disease is one caused by the admission of some form of living matter into the body of a human being or of a lower animal. All diseases are clearly not communicable in the sense that they are due to the presence of living things. Indigestion, for instance, I can not communicate to my neighbor, however serious my dietetic indiscretions.

Now, while the actual microorganisms causing many of the infectious diseases have been discovered in these recent days through the agency of the microscope--one of science's most valuable gifts to suffering humanity--a few diseases undoubtedly infectious have, even up to the present time, not had their microorganic causes discovered. Smallpox or variola is one of these. The term variola is from the Latin varus, a pimple.

The name Small Pox, which first occurs in Holinshead's "Chronicle" (1571), was given to this disease to distinguish it from the Great Pox or syphilis, the French disease, or Morbus Gallicus which attained the proportions of an epidemic in Europe about 1494. The expression "The Pox" in the older medical literature always refers to the Lues Venereal The word "pox" is the plural form of pock; the spelling "pox" is phonetic; "pocks" is the correct form.[1]

[1] Thus the following expression in Galt's "Annals of the Parish" is justified--"My son Gilbert was seized with the smallpox and was blinded by THEM for seventeen days."

Smallpox is unquestionably a highly infectious or communicable disease, and in the language of a past day, there is a virus or poison which can pass from the sick to the unaffected; when this transference occurs on a large scale we speak of an epidemic of smallpox. As Sir William Osler truly says, "It is not a little remarkable that in a disease, which is rightly regarded as the type of all infectious maladies, the specific virus still remains unknown." The same, however, is true of the common diseases of scarlatina, measles and chickenpox. Of some diseases, the virus is a bacillus or coccus, excessively minute fungi recognizable only under the microscope; but the bacteriologists are now beginning to speak of viruses so impalpable that they, unlike ordinary bacteria, can go through the pores of a clay filter, are filter-passers, that is are of ultra-microscopic dimensions. Some authorities conjecture that the virus of variola belongs to the group of filter-passers. The virus of smallpox, however, is very resistant and can be carried through the air for considerable distances; it clings for long periods to clothes, books, furniture, etc.

I shall not now digress to give the clinical details of a case of smallpox; the eruption may be slight or it may be very extensive. It occurs in three forms, discrete, confluent and hemorrhagic. The most dangerous form of smallpox is the confluent, in which the face and arms particularly are covered with large pustular areas of a most disfiguring appearance.

The disease called chickenpox, or varicella, has no relationship to smallpox and does not protect from it, nor does smallpox protect from chickenpox.

HISTORY OF SMALLPOX

There seems very little doubt that the home of smallpox was somewhere on the continent of Africa, although it is true that there are traditions pointing to its existence in Hindustan at least 1000 B.C. One Hindu account alludes to an ointment for removing the cicatrices of eruption. Africa has certainly for long been a prolific source of it: every time a fresh batch of slaves was brought over to the United States of America there was a fresh outbreak of smallpox.[2] It seems that the first outbreak in Europe in the Christian era was in the latter half of the sixth century, when it traveled from Arabia, visiting Egypt on the way. The earliest definite statements about it come from Arabia and are contained in an Arabic manuscript now in the University of Leyden, which refers to the years A.D. 570 and 571. There is a good deal of evidence that the Arabs introduced smallpox into Egypt at the sacking of Alexandria in A.D. 640. Pilgrims and merchants distributed it throughout Syria and Palestine and along the north of Africa; then, crossing the Mediterranean, they took it over to Italy. The Moors introduced it into Spain whence, via Portugal, Navarre, Languedoc and Guienne it was carried into western and northern Europe. The earliest physician to describe smallpox is Ahrun, a Christian Egyptian, who wrote in Greek. He lived in Alexandria from A.D. 610 to 641. The first independent treatise on the disease was by the famous Arabian physician, Rhazes, who wrote in Syriac in 920 A.D., but his book has been translated into both Greek and Latin. The first allusion to smallpox in English is in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the early part of the tenth century; the passage is interesting--"Against pockes: very much shall one let blood and drink a bowl full of melted butter; if they [pustules] strike out, one should dig each with a thorn and then drop one-year alder drink in, then they will not be seen," this was evidently to prevent the pitting dreaded even at so early a date. Smallpox was first described in Germany in 1493, and appeared in Sweden first in 1578.

[2] Osler thinks the pesta magna of Galen was smallpox; Marcus Aurelius died of it.

The contributions of Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, to the knowledge of smallpox, are classical.

Throughout the Middle Ages, owing to the very crowded and unsanitary state of the cities of Europe, smallpox was one of the various plagues from which the inhabitants were never free for any length of time.[3] Leprosy, influenza, smallpox, cholera, typhus fever and bubonic plague constituted the dreadful group. In most countries, including England, smallpox was practically endemic; an attack of it was accepted as a thing inevitable, in children even more inevitable than whooping-cough, measles, mumps or chickenpox is regarded at the present time. There was a common saying--"Few escape love or smallpox." In the eighteenth century so many faces were pitted from severe smallpox that it is said any woman who had no smallpox marks was straightway accounted beautiful. Very few persons escaped it in either the mild or the severe form in childhood or in later life.

[3] England was by no means exempt, but it was not infection in
the modern sense that Shakespeare meant when he wrote--
"This England,
This fortress, built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war."