Every form of disease and degeneracy, physical and mental, is rampant. A well-known authority on brain-diseases warns us that if mental defectiveness continues to increase at its present rapid pace, soon we shall be unable to support the asylums required to accommodate and segregate the unfortunate victims thereof. They must remain at large--to perpetuate and multiply indefinitely their terrible afflictions. Yet how is it possible that such weedy, half-sterilised creatures as are so many of our modern mothers, should bear sound and sane and vigorous offspring? Inherited debilitation and defect are further aggravated by present-day educational methods. Our modern rendering of the training of the young is the _straining_ of the young. Developing creatures should never be allowed to over-use function or faculty. Because to over-tire an immature faculty is to deplete its vital resources of development. Nor should young developing creatures be permitted to do anything too strenuously or for too long a time. Narrowness and mental warp result inevitably from too early and too long periods of concentration in one direction, of the ductile shaping brain. In defiance, nevertheless, of this first principle of rearing, boys and girls, after the morning's brain-work, are kept at strenuous games for hours in succession. Body and mind, after having been cramped between the covers of text-books, now are cramped within the narrow rules and rigid form of such miscalled "games," supervised by over-keen experts--the whole business exacting sustained muscular tension, temperamental excitement and competitive nervous strain. The powers are stretched to win some goal, in place of being unbent in leisure and in pleasure. True play is spontaneous enjoyment of the moment, not fierce concentration upon goals. This latter induces excitement, which may be pleasurable, but it entails its tax in reactionary exhaustion. Because of the spur of competition in them, sports and games, as now rendered, act as powerful nerve-stimulants that deplete and waste the vital powers. School-boys and school-girls live, for the most part, in alternating states of high tension in sports and reactionary languors from the heart and nervous strain resulting therefrom. Since sports and athletics became a cult, heart-diseases have increased by 50 _per cent._ We complain that our young men are limp and unintelligent, lacking in initiative and enterprise. Apart from the serious circumstance that, mentally, they have been trained for cricket, not for life, most of them (to employ their own phrase) have "gone stale" in heart and brain, in consequence of forced athletics, long before they come to the momentous business of living. Even their muscles have wasted, in place of developing. With the result that instead of being finely-built and graceful, numbers of our youths are stiff, stoop-shouldered and abnormally attenuated.