It is not our intention to speak in any special manner about prescribed remedies for different ailments, since our concern is with the general standard of health and fitness rather than with temporary ailments, for which in many cases some special treatment is the most convenient remedy. But our object being to show how by a proper mode of life the body may be put into a state of health in which it is the least likely to need any help from drugs or special treatment, it would be clearly out of place, and imply a want of faith on our part in our present system if we thought it in the least necessary to talk much about remedial treatments. But there are certain simple applications of water and heat, which though they may be adopted remedially, are yet part of a rational and healthy mode of life--that is to say, they can both be used by anyone suffering from some definite complaint, and at the same time belong to the daily and regular _régime_ of the thoroughly healthy man. The different sorts of baths, for instance, are, if rightly and scientifically used, both remedial, and will form part of the daily treatment of the healthy body. As far as concerns the upper classes, at any rate, there is probably no race in the world which nowadays[10] uses so much water as the Anglo-Saxon; but our manner of using it is, to a large extent, luxurious rather than practical, sensuous rather than sensible. The morning cold bath, for instance, which some Frenchman the other day wittily called the “Englishman’s castle,” is, though eminently healthy and invigorating for some people, neither healthy nor invigorating for all, and cleansing for none except in a slight degree. The cold bath, indeed, is a sort of fetish; it is regarded as a piece of ritual belonging to the scheme of things which “makes us Englishmen what we are,” and to criticise the use of cold baths is something like “taking the breeks off a Hielander.” But for the sake of those thousands who have cold baths because it is their habit, and feel rather chilled and dispirited than otherwise by the process, it is perhaps worth while to say a few words about cold and other baths.