We went to war to make the world safe for democracy, and we put several
millions of our young men into armies, and if there were any of them who
did not already know how to smoke cigarettes, they learned it under
official sanction. So now we have a national tobacco bill that runs up
to two billions, and will insure us a new generation of "Class C"
rating. Speaking to the young radicals who are reading my books, I say:
We want to make the world over, to make it a place of freedom and
kindness, instead of the hell of greed and hate that it is today. For
that purpose we need a new moral code, and we can never win our victory
without it. I have attended radical conventions, sitting in unventilated
halls amid clouds of tobacco smoke, and listening to men wrangle all
through the day and a great part of the night; I have watched the fatal
dissensions in the movement, the quarrelings of the right wingers and
the left wingers and all stages and degrees in between, and I have
wondered--not jestingly, but in pitying earnest--how much of all those
personalities and factional misunderstanding had their origin in carbon
dioxide and nicotine. There is no use suggesting such ideas to the older
men, whose habits are fixed; but a new generation is coming on, with a
new vision of the enormous task before it; and is it too much to expect
of these young men and women, that they shall realize in advance the
grim tasks they have to do, and shall learn to run the machine of their
body so as to get out of it the maximum amount of service? Is it too
much to hope for, that some day we shall have a race of young fighters
for truth and justice, who are willing to live abstemious lives, and
consecrate themselves to the task of delivering mankind from wage
slavery and war?
CHAPTER XXIII
MORE ABOUT HEALTH
(Discusses the subjects of breathing and ventilation, clothing,
bathing and sleep.)
In discussing the question of health, we have given the greater part of
the space to the subject of diet, for the reason that experience has
convinced us that diet is two-thirds of health, and that nearly always
in disease you find errors of diet playing a part. There are, however,
other important factors of health, now to be discussed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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