accept and follow or be damned. I am willing to go and feed with the Scotch and the horses (_vide_ Johnson’s foolish remark about oatmeal), and be regarded as uneducated and be ostracized both as a boor and a vulgarian, and even be damned in words, which, thank God, is quite as far as He allows any one human being to “damn” another. For I am opposed to these things one and all. I am not a pessimist about our civilization: I am an optimist. Yet I often find my optimism strongly tinged with pessimistic color. And how can it be otherwise? Can any thinking man have much respect--any, in fact--for that phase of his civilization which permits the building of colossal fortunes by the monopolization of the sale of _necessities_, when the poor who are compelled to buy these necessities are growing poorer and poorer each year? [Illustration: INDIAN BEADWORK OF GREEK FRET DESIGN.] Can I respect any civilization that for the 125 years of its existence has refused to pass laws for the preservation of the purity of the food of its poor? The rich can buy what and where they choose, but for the whole period of our existence we have been so bound, hand and foot, by the money-makers who have vitiated our food supply that they might add a few more millions to their dirty hoard of ungodly dollars that we have closed our eyes to the physical and spiritual demoralization that has come to the poor by the poisoned concoctions handed out to them--under protection of United States laws--as foods. Can I respect an educational institution that educates the minds of its children at the expense of their bodies? That has so little common sense and good judgment as to be putting its children through fierce competitive examinations when they should be strengthening their bodies at the critical age of adolescence? Can I bow down before the civilization whose highest educational establishments--Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, New York, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, followed by hosts of others of lesser institutions--every year send out from five to thirty per cent of their students broken down in health? What is the good of all the book-learning that all the ages have amassed unless one has physical health to enjoy it? Only this last year a Harvard graduate came to me who had taken high degree in the study of law and was adjudged eminently prepared to begin to practice his profession. But his health was gone. He was a nervous and physical wreck. His physicians commanded complete rest for a year, and suggested that five years would be none too long for him to spend in recuperation. When this young man asked me to give him my candid expressions upon the matter, I asked him if he thought imbeciles could have made a worse mess of his “education” than had the present system, which had cultivated his intellect, but so disregarded the needs of his body that his intellect was powerless to act.