Keeping fit all the way : $b how to obtain and maintain health, strength and efficiencyCamp, Walter
Science
Keeping fit all the way : $b how to obtain and maintain health, strength and efficiency
Camp, Walter
Hygiene; Physical education and training
An Englishman once writing of the tendency of the elders to blot out all
the fire of youth with restrictive legislation, said, "It is a fearful
responsibility to be young, and none can bear it like their elders." How
can a youth whose blood is warm within sit like his grandsire carved in
alabaster? He cannot and he will not, and that is the salvation of the
race. It is the old story of the stag in the herd. He will see no other
usurp his rights until he is too old to have any.
Let me tell you something of the history of these attempts by the elders
to curb the everlasting spirit of youth. At one time they would have
eliminated all the sports. But we didn't let croquet become the national
game! You ask what this nation of ours will become, and in reply I ask
you what will you make of your boys?
Statisticians tell us that 90 per cent. of the men who go into business
fail. Do you want your boy to fold his hands and say that because the
chances are against him he will not try at all?
Are you going to let him get such a maximum of old man's caution that he
reduces to a minimum the young man's courage?
Make him strong and well, just as you wish the nation to be strong and
sound. There will always be plenty of middle-aged failures to preach
caution.
Teach your boy fair play and may the best man win.
Teach him that the true sportsman "boasts little, crows gently when in
luck, puts up, pays up, and shuts up when beaten"; that he should be
strong in order to protect his country. A boy may over-emphasize his
sports, but he will get over that. They tell us about the good old times
when boys at college spent all their time in study and loved one
another. There never were any such times. The town-and-gown riots took
the place of sports, that's all.
ECONOMIC LOSSES
We are all of us very much interested in the life of an automobile tire,
and it seems to speak to us in terms we can readily understand. But only
the particularly wise and successful men of our generation know and
appreciate how valuable the life of a man is when expressed in those
same terms of good hard dollars. Many manufacturers in the last two or
three years have awakened to the fact that when, they put in a man and
he stayed with them only two or three months, or even, in the case of
executives, two or three years and then dropped out, either to go
elsewhere or on account of ill health, it was a very distinct loss. In
other words, they had put a certain investment into the man and that
investment should have been growing more valuable to them all the time.
Germany's General Staff, previous to this war, was working overtime,
just as our Cabinet and National Board of Defense are doing now--namely,
till midnight and beyond. But the German General Staff was taken out
into the Thiergarten in the morning for from one to two hours of
exercise as a beginning of the day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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