775 C23 Carroll - Old at forty or Southern Branch of the University of California Los Angeles Form L-l This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 1 7 . OCT 2 2 1924 APR 2 2 1925 5m-8,'21 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY SIMPLIFYING THE SCIENCE OF GROWING OLD THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY SIMPLIFYING THE SCIENCE OF GROWING OLD BY ROBERT S. CARROLL, M.D. Medical Director, Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina Author of "The Mastery of Nervousness," "The Soul in Suffering." "Our Nervous Friends" THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1920 All riffhtt reterved COPTBIGHT, 1920, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published, July, 1920 T75 THE THOUGHT Whether the constructive forces of maturity are to wane in the early forties or to remain, impelling ,and unimpaired, into the sixties is a question of fn personal interest to every vital man and woman. /^ Most of our ancestors who have known fulness of years merely met, through fortuitous circum- stances, the Accident of Old Age. Others endowed perchance with unusual clearness of vision sensed 'and practiced the Art of Growing Old. But never before in man's history has the ability . to lengthen and better the latter years, to live out in satisfaction and comfort the scriptural "three score and ten," been reducible to general practice. To-day we may speak confidently of the Science of p" Growing Old a science which has been translated J< into simple terms in the following chapters. 1 To those who are looking to chemistry or surg- >. ery for a wonder-working drug or youth-restoring operation, these pages will prove a disappoint- ment. "OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY" is for those who are seeking the guidance of scientifically revealed truth, not the leadings of visionary pseudo-science. CONTENTS CHAPTEa I How WE GROW OLD ......... 1 II THREE VITAL. FAULTS ......... 10 III WHY THE BODY FAILS ........ 19 IV FOOD THAT WRECKS ......... 28 V PLEASURE OR PROFIT IN EATING ...... 40 VI THE EASE THAT DESTROYS ....... 60 VII BLENDING WORK AND PLAY ....... 72 VIII RENEWING ONE'S YOUTH ........ 92 IX WHY THE MIND FAILS ........ 102 X KEEPING THE MIND YOUNG ....... 110 XI WHEN SLEEP Is A PROBLEM ....... 121 XII SUNSHINE OR SHADOWS ........ 133 XIII THE BEST Is YET TO BE . . 141 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY CHAPTER I HOW WE GROW OLD What is Age I am wondering how you and I grow old. This wonder leads to another what is age ? And, thus wondering, one becomes thought- ful. ''She is old beyond her time." "He never lost his youth thru his seventy years." What do we mean by "old" and "young"? Is it a matter of multiplying wrinkles, of the whitening and thin- ning of locks once richly colored and luxuriant, of shrinking and softening muscles which a few years agone leaped with the zest of living? Is it when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened that old age is upon us ; or is it more than muscles, teeth and dulling vision? These and other visible signs of age came to him "who never lost his youth thru his seventy years," yet only the thoughtless called him "old." What had he that kept youth close thru the multiplying seasons? Whence the erect stature, the alert step, the quickly responding smile, the warming sympathies, the grasp of cur- rent topics, the unwavering optimism and childlike 2 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY faith in a personal, saving Creator? Is it not that he has held tight his responsiveness to life and things, people and events? Physically, mentally, spiritually he has refused to allow his interests to wane ; to those which are constructive he has ever attended ; from interests contributing to the pass- ing hour only he has turned with resolution. He has ignored the selfishness-breeding. With a wis- dom far from universal he still chooses each day a refreshing, developing interest. We age differently. Gradually our bodies be- come less and less resilient the rebound goes, then the strength ; and ultimately the weakness of senility is certain if life survives the years. The capacity of the body to respond to the demands of active physical living has waned. And to most of us the essence of senility lies in the physical changes so obvious and, to the eyes of youth or thoughtlessness, so convincing. But robust bodies frequently bear minds which have long since lost much of their power of deeper understanding, of appreciative response, of wise decision and resolute undertaking. A mind dull of emotion, sluggish of thought, unstable in will, has lost its freshness its youth is no more. The spirit too that self we boast as immortal how early it may cease any effort to be increas- ingly responsive to the things eternal ! Far from renewing its youth, the soul is satisfied with its early growth, and when body, mind or spirit says "It is enough," just then we begin to a>ge. In our common conception of becoming old, we sense, however, but the physical aspect. "As old HOW WE GROW OLD 3 as our arteries" is a medical truism that medical which has not progressed beyond a knowledge of the physical alone. And, unquestionably, an in- curable old age does finally come to flesh and blood, but here is our message it is in human power to stay the fleeing years, to carry strength and freshness, understanding and usefulness, the very joy of living, past the proverbial " three score and ten. " And this power is based unalterably in the soul "the captain of our fate." How We Age Probably few of us realize how frequently the spiritual self that self which dic- tates our ultimate policy of life, the arbiter of our decisions, the presiding judge at the council-table where our life's principles are determined that this deeply placed soul-self is first to age. Joel wrote, "Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The mind dreams, and dreams are neither prophetic nor inspired. But who, wrought of flesh, has not in his soul felt the touch of divinity, and for the hour seen visions of a better self masterful, merciful, exalted; from twelve to eighteen how they thrill and beau- tify life, before we are "disillusioned," as the sated ones say. How heaven-revealing are those hours of high resolve ! How freely, then, we would emulate the martyrs and give our all that our visions be not dimmed! Part of the fire of youth is the flaming forth of the virtues. We all know how gripping is our early religious training. How much more com- mon it is to lose faith than to change faith ! When in life are the whisperings of the still small voice 4 OLD AT FORTY OE YOUNG AT SIXTY so distinct, or do they command such unquestioned obedience? Religious workers testify abundantly to the rarity of conversions in maturity as compared with those in adolescence, for with mul- tiplying years the capacity to undergo a change of heart becomes less common. Possibly the aver- age man's satisfaction in living content with his few youthful hours of soul-revelation, and in giv- ing more and more of the fulness of his days to material living, evidences the immaturity of our race. That this, however, is no fixed law of our being is revealed to the observing in those many lives of unquestioned closeness to God, which have been found in all civilizations thruout recorded history. We are speaking of the average man and woman in whom the power of early religious ideals to practically influence conduct is lost be- fore thirty. We frequently speak of the conservation of habit, and no law of development so holds us as this which takes us over the same path again and again, even tho' a meandering, indirect path. A thousand things we do incorrectly, imperfectly, bunglingly, perchance, and continue so to do, for thus we were taught. Habits of thinking, decid- ing, eating, exercising, praying, remain unaltered and become more and more fortified against changes suggested by reason or righteousness. The emotional life, so high-keyed in youth, thrilling with such wondrous possibilities of beauteous or riotous living, may become rife with fears, may repel rebelliously and resentfully every obstacle to desire, or cheap hope evolve but a sudsy optimism. HOW WE GROW OLD 5 Emotional overactivity is normal during early years, but emotional responses become so fixed with the majority, before forty, that the student of character can predetermine the reaction of an indi- vidual in a given situation as accurately as the naturalist can foretell the defense of certain birds or animals when attacked. The intellect, too, is usually settled into grooves which decide its activities before the forties are reached. Teachers who must keep step with prog- ress, the exceptional student in the professions, isolated men or women spurred by personal am- bition or the genuine love of study persevere in post-graduate work. These actually read and profit by their "five-foot bookshelf," and add to their intellectual stores more from year to year than is served to them by the daily news or thought out for them in weekly and monthly maga- zines. But do not the majority of grown-ups yawn or become irritated at the appeal of the intellect for more? Many minds reason better as they mature. The power to reason is the power to group, to classify, and this relieves memory of a load of detail. It is one of the mind's most comfortable economies. And so the good reasoner often retreats behind his reasoning and avoids the insistence of an un- ending procession of facts, many of which, un- doubtedly, he could use if he would, to augment his powers. So with Mr. and Mrs. Everybody, thirty-five marks the age of mental comfort and satisfaction. College work is over. Opinions have been formed on all vital subjects, formed 6 OLD AT FORTY OB YOUNG AT SIXTY and here's the rub re-expressed, and for the majority expression is crystallization. Expressed beliefs are slowly retracted. At thirty-five occu- pation has been chosen, home well started, and all too surely the doors of the mind begin to close; and the evolutionary is henceforth termed, " revo- lutionary. " Spiritually aging at twenty, mentally aging at thirty-five what of the body? It, of the three, is most susceptible to permanently disabling acci- dent. Overnight it may be smitten in childhood, and all capacity for future growth blighted. A flash, and eyes are blinded and hearing rent asun- der. The decrepitude of deformity and infirmity may be a heritage from youth, but rarely thus does artificial senility first come. Multitudes begin complaining in their twenties or thirties and com- plain on, to the end, decrying their pale, flabby, weakling bodies. Others, deformed by their over- abundance of bulk, wheeze and puff and stew thru comfortless decades. Strength, grace, agility, vir- ility, comeliness, capacity for endurance, the thrill of effort, the virtue of physical health and whole- someness have long since gone for them. "Fore- ordained,'* a " heritage, " "poor rearing," are claimed in explanation but falsely. The true ex- planation is found in the individual's physical habits. Ignorance of the laws of well-living or, in the face of knowledge, the soul's acceptance of comfort and ease of days or decades of pleasure- bearing indulgence tells the tale. The world's great mass of infirmity and presenility, then, is not based in defective physical inheritance but in ig- HOW WE GROW OLD 7 norance of the right way of life or the deficiency of character to pursue that way. The normal body mellows into age gradually and comfortably. For the generation covering the years of maturity the changes are almost imperceptible. Capacity for physical readjustment lingers long. Even the development of crude muscular strength is not limited to youth- The body's marvelous power to adjust itself to changing seasons, to multiplying vicissitudes or altering conditions of life, responds much more promptly after forty than the mind's ability to reconstruct opinion or belief. The med- ical profession itself is inadequately alive to the physiologic response of human tissues to right- eously fulfilled laws of physical living, even thru the years of late maturity. Unless some vital or- gan is disabled, the average man of affairs, and his wife, can double, yes, often treble, their physical reserve ; can increase several fold their vital capac- ity, as late as sixty. An advanced medical science to-day is teaching that many hearts and kidneys and most stomachs and livers and all voluntary muscles, which include most aching backs and flabby fronts, can be marvelously rejuvenated by right living, rightly lived. _ Your wise Good Doctor is consulted in his office by Mr. Man-of- Wealth, who is but forty and who offers him a fee, any fee perchance, to renew for him his failing physical youth. Operation, treat- ments, medicines, for these he will pay, and per- haps express thanks. "But," the doctor says, * ' you are living ignorantly, you must change your habits." 8 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY This starts an unsatisfactory discussion. * ' My parents lived as I do and lived to a ripe old age." "You are living ignorantly, ' ' the counsellor in- sists, and from the abundance of his experience he foresees a disappointing outcome of the interview. His patient does not wish nor intend to change his habits he is already mentally too old to profit by the saving knowledge his physician is eager to give. And rare is the medical adviser who pre- sumes to tell Mr. Kichman or even Mr. Poorman the whole, bald truth : that his body is weakening, his appetite fading, his sleep ceasing to satisfy be- cause he is morally lacking, because he is so de- fective in character that he cannot deny himself the gratifications of his table, the soothing seduc- tions of nicotin or the fatuous boost of alcoholic excess ; that he is so lacking in moral backbone as to be incapable of exercising consistently and vig- orously enough to deserve health or to earn vigor or even his bread. Mr. Kichman would leave the presence of such counsel, insulted. Mr. Poor- man would tersely remark that he thought he had come to a doctor, not to a preacher- Long since, for both patients, the day to receive benefit thru moral correction has passed. Both Mr. Kichman and Mr. Poorman have failed utterly to vision the saving help proffered, the only help which could bring them a renewing of years. Without intel- lects to discern the truth, or the moral force to put that truth into daily use, their futures are lost. There never will be a medicated Fountain of Youth. How do we grow old ? Not the exceptional man or woman, but just you and I? Early, thru defi- ciency in our spiritual responses ; later, by becom- ing satisfied with dulling mental reactions and only finally by the inevitable but too often unsea- sonable loss of physical adaptability ! CHAPTER II THEEE VITAL FAULTS Food-Exercise Balance If we accept the con- clusions of our first chapter, that the mass of men and women age first spiritually, then mentally and last physically, our following chapters, to be con- sistent, should deal with the problems in like order. But while we shall insist that prematurely aging souls are responsible for robbing the average per- son of a score of healthful, constructive, happi- ness-breeding, earthly years, we shall, for reasons of emphasis, invert the order and study bodily depreciation and restitution first, then mental, and save the best for the last. Zoology teaches of carnivorous beasts, herbi- vorous herds, and of man, the omnivorous. What has he not eaten? Where among living, growing things does he not to-day seek his food, that he may subsist, that he may have plenty, that he may luxuriously feast? The wealth of the tropics is distributed to the tables of the populous North by fleets of fast freighters; the surface of the sea is spread with nets and its depths pierced that its teeming life may feed our hunger or caress our palates; hill-side and plain have been converted into a million blooming, nodding, fruiting fields, that many may eat, that thousands may sate. 10 THREE VITAL FAULTS 11 Even the ice-locked antipodes support the fat- laden Eskimo in half-yearly indolence. A super- abundant provision exists to feed the world's bil- lions! Pestilence and war may interfere with mankind's food supply for a few, unusual years, but scientific production and preservation and foresight will secure the future against even these. Our children's children face the problem of over, not under food-supply. And they must adapt themselves with rare wisdom to the temptation of food-variety and food-abundance, or the race will suffer even as do overfed thousands to-day, and the already large toll of the food-damaged be uni- versally multiplied. Cain was a hunter, Abel an husbandman. Bill is a farmer, Jim a mechanic and Pete a laborer; but what of the Williams, Arthurs, Alphonsos, Horatios, Reginalds, not to mention the Lillians, Maries, Beatrices and Pearls who toil not, neither do they spin? In a large measure to-day, and with fateful certainty, will come a scientifically produced plenty, arm in arm with an increasing decrease in human effort made possible by man's uncanny ingenuity in redeeming the soil and cre- ating labor-saving machinery. Even now the mi- nority easily food-supplies the majority. In an early chapter of Genesis we find ordained the greatest single health edict of all time, but already for many generations earning one 's bread has not been aristocratic, and to-day sweating brows are not popular. Physical effort grows less necessary in the relation of food to work, and we prevision ages to come when for the large 12 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY majority labor of hand will hardly be practical. Still we hear no scientifically divine oracle an- nouncing a principle which divorces disease from physical idleness. The word disease is here used to include both of its unhappy meanings. So much for the race, the race which is to be but an evolvement of the you's and me's and what of us? Most of us, consciously or otherwise, even in lean after-war days have a genuine problem in eating. Our great grand-elders labored as the Lord commanded the original children of Adam there was more for their children. Our own par- ents had too much, and with the plenty came neither food-wisdom nor any personal necessity for effort. We are three generations from fron- tier life. We represent the age of the world's greatest plenty. When we have our lives insured, we comfortably cite the old ages attained by our sires and grandsires. But already, even before forty, we are paying the price of too much "eat" and too little sweaty work. With us all, appetite is peculiarly a matter of personal habit and the good things of mother's table continue to tempt us thru years of over- indulgence. As boys, we needed and were given three hearty meals, with many bread-and-jams and cookies and bags of candy, in between. Even as girls, many detrimental sweets were allowed in and out of season. Long before forty our out-of- door play-times have ceased and with them the chore-hour or the mornings, helping mother; school athletics, hilarious days spent swimming, fishing, rowing and tramping are no more, and THREE VITAL FAULTS 13 many other habits of living have changed. Most of us make no least attempt to adapt our food to our changing customs. We go so far as to claim for ourselves personal endowments: "cast-iron" stomachs, the ability to " digest tacks" and the capacity to ever eat our fill without a rebuking qualm. But more pet their stomachs with the abundance of thought and protective care the mother gives a sick baby. And the lists of what does not agree with them, beginning with the most digestible of all food, milk, gradually become more and more sane as they approach fudge, fried cab- bage and lobster a la Newberg. By forty our eating habits may become so entrenched as to be considered by many on a par with personal rights, and any modification suggested by our health ad- viser is followed by such unquestioned discomfort that most of us fall back on the self-satisfying ex- cuse of personal idiosyncrasy, even as does the smoker or wine-bibber in attempted reform. But, with the passing of each year savingly unsympa- thetic science becomes more and more certain that the balance of physical health can be maintained thru the generations, or restored to you and me, when lost, only by a rational adjustment of muscle activity and food. From the standpoint of main- taining one's physical youth, with all that this means in life, a food-exercise equilibrium is the most vital factor. The majority who find health slipping at forty, overeat ; the minority undereat ; in both cases the balance has been broken. Work and Rest Balance The love of ease is instinctive, a protective instinct, for the human 14 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY mechanism must rest that there may be health. Another vital balance is demanded that of effort and recuperation; without invigorating effort, apathy, sluggishness and weakness, defective re- sistance and finally the body a toxic slough of in- activity ! Without recuperation deadening weari- ness, exhaustion, wreck of body or mind must come. So fatigue is sent, not to be shunned, but to be sought with the certainty that each meeting will bring earned rest. Fatigue is the refresh- ment-promising friend we should meet each day. When we know him well he will guard us from our enemy, exhaustion, and to know him well is to love him. " Honestly tired" is his other name, and his friendship makes life mightily worth liv- ing. There are many who confuse fatigue and exhaustion; there are a few who would ignore them both the overambitious, the habitual wor- rier, the victim of acute mania, these all sacrifice the calm of poise for damaging mental or physical overactivity. The saving ease is the product of strength and fatigue, not having which we travel the pace that kills. To him who is working, think- ing and feeling right, the ease of relaxation fol- lows effort, even as the echo a call. The ease of a perfect night's sleep who can voice its values? Sympathy-breeding converse, the enjoyed half -hour at the table, the journey home after the day's well-done work, the evening hour with books that refresh and instruct, the delightfully restoring five minutes' relaxation of mind and body how gloriously invigorating! And to those who would pilfer unearned ease, how THREE VITAL FAULTS 15 unsensed! The restless, dissatisfied, resentful, wretched ones are those who would know ease, ignoring fatigue, for, sooner or later, in this gen- eration or the next, man pays the price physically, mentally or spiritually. He climbs from where his parents must leave him if he wins any heights. One is given a heritage of wealth; another, and blessed be the name of those who begat him, is early taught the habit of industry. One can buy the ease which breeds stagnation ; the other wins the ease which represents mastery. But mastery demands strength superstrength and super- strength is rare, for our love of comfort has denied it us ; and the man or woman who is daily adding some bit of new strength to his life's equipment, resolutely putting something into the storehouse for the future, he who persistently adds some frac- tion of muscular endurance, mental capacity or spiritual understanding to each day's duties, is rare, even as the masterful are rare. The millions labor and, weary and spent, dully wend their ways homeward. Something to stimu- late or amuse they crave almost universally. These millions live thru their working years too close to their margins ; in no part of their life have they created a comfort-assuring reserve, and doggedly they live. Stinted in interests, their minds are unconsciously hungry, incapable of be- ing fed; destitute of physical reserve, they drag on, with tired bodies, and pay a fearful toll to dis- ease; without visions, their souls seldom speak, and life for them is restlessness and emptiness. " Exhausted," " worn-out," " chronically 16 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY tired," "utterly frazzled"! How often we hear such complaints. And to him who knows, they are usually the plaints of weakness, rarely the cries of strength which is spent. Many men, and more women, find themselves at forty restlessly, fever- ishly seeking the comforts that disintegrate, and as resolutely avoiding effortful thinking, working, feeling, which alone construct the strength that makes effort joyous. There is no more faithful servant of disease than the mocking ease of com- fort-seeking indolence. The Cheer-Life How like a mirror is childhood, with its instant reflection of the pain of cherished pets, the moods of elders, the rebuffs of playmates. How like the insistent breaking of spring sunshine thru drifting clouds is the cheer of childhood, returning so quickly after pain, punishment or re- buffs. And what a dreary habitat would be man's were it not for the cheer of children and of those who have held fast to undying youth and its glad- ness ! Addled or curdled must be the nature which does not brighten before such heartening cheer. Of one-hundred adults it is said ninety-five will re- spond to the depressing and unhappiness-produc- ing in a given situation, where five will optimistic- ally see the best in the worst. This proportion is probably inaccurate, but it serves to remind us that there are far more gloom-producers, fault- finding critics, cynics, pessimists, habitual grouches, calamity-howlers and woe-dispensers than cheer-makers. The sad souls certainly out- number those whose spiritual natures resolutely reflect the rich fulness of the joy-life and happi- THREE VITAL FAULTS 17 ness-living. The miserable majority misplace cheer with childish things and enter maturity as tho' chained to their tasks, with faces averted and eyes downcast and no glad song in their hearts, wailing strains of their dirge out of time and out of tune. What evidence have we of untimely aging of the spirit so obvious as the dimming of the cheer-life? Age has stricken him whose ears do not thrill in response to the glad voices of children, whose heart does not leap forth to greet the hilarity of youth. Many homes are but antic- ipatory tombs, with the gloom-life shut in, and the glad-life shut out. Even the young must age in schools and offices, in shops and factories, where gladsome greetings, cheering responses, witty sallies and mutual help and buoyancy are smoth- ered in a joy-killing atmosphere! The heavy hand of sorrow and misfortune lays sore burdens on too many hearts. Death and disgrace and disaster come to agingly touch the many before maturity is well spent. Eare and beautiful and heartening is the spirit that meets mis- fortune with a hallowing, only, of the cheer which it radiates! Young independence claims its right to grouch, but sour moods are as definitely toxic as sour stomachs. Millions are spent annually upon those hired to assume cheer, but artificial cheerfulness is the shallow response of weak natures in the beautiful seriousness of life. Genuine cheer is not of the face, is not a mood, is not a concealing pretense; it is an evi- dence of youth and health of spirit that cheer 18 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY which goes not a few leagues but the whole way. Three faults that age we consider toxin-breed- ers all : one hardening the arteries, another dulling the mind, the last chilling the soul. CHAPTER III WHY THE BODY FAILS Problem of Physical Adjustment As we con- sider life in its multiple forms, from the micro- scopic single-celled organism to the highly com- plex animal with his billions of differentiated cells, we ultimately realize that all expressions of life are simply more or less perfect adjustments of the individual to his manifold and varying surround- ings. These adjustments may be practically per- fect for the few, but with the majority of indi- viduals perfection is a far call. In a forest of oaks a few attain perfect symmetry of proportion and spread and tower, finely superior to their hundred neighbors. In a row of nodding, beaming sunflowers there seems always the one specimen which has distinctly distanced its companions. In a fountain-basin stocked with fish there will ever be one or two which outgrow and outlive the others. The one or two have more perfectly ap- propriated oxygen and utilized food, and have thus developed the aggressive capacity to secure the wherewithal for more strength. Even as with trees and flowers and fish so it is with folks. The exceptional man or woman shows superior vital capacity as expressed in free- dom from illness, unusual power of mind or body, 19 20 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY a prolonged life of comfortable years, or rare ease in meeting and mastering the multitude of life's problems. The exceptional tree, flower, fish, man, has been associated in each instance with others who in comparison have failed, more or less, in finding an equal fulness of living. Superiority of germ plasm unquestionably answers the query why, for many exceptions. Yet the seeds of the most magnificent sunflower planted in barren soil will fail to reproduce its hereditary supremacy, while the seeds from some pale, dwarfed specimen will respond promptly to the ministrations of the wise gardener, and attain magnificence in a few short generations. The problem is much simpler for folks than for sunflowers. The necessity of remaining rooted in barren soil is laid only upon a defective, small minority. The rest of us can move to other soil or enrich the soil in which we are living. Failure of body, the failure we call age, indicates always that the balance between the vital organs and the work thrown upon these organs is break- ing. And, let us here note a vital truth the work which most rapidly ages us is not that which duty and progress lay upon us, but the vast, useless labor of our eliminative organs in keeping our systems freed from self -produced poisons; or the unceasing struggle of our minds with anxious wor- ries; or the soul's failure to find a blessing faith. For us all this balance cannot be indefinitely main- tained, but for nine-tenths of humanity it can, thru right use and protection, be prolonged thru many added years. Rarely do we meet a cripple in WHY THE BODY FAILS 21 whose face shines the vigor of wholesome health. We expect him to be sallow and poorly nourished, and relatively short-lived. He is unable to per- fectly meet the requirements of physical living which maintain the balance between vitality and work. The physical activities of the tuberculous sufferer must be most rigidly safeguarded when the lungs, vital organs, are affected. One so dis- eased is practically decrepit and, like those in ad- vanced age, goes down under a finger's weight of unwise strain. And so it is with victims of or- ganically damaged hearts. The dyspeptic and the neurotic there are multitudes of these are practically prematurely old. In them the vital or- gans or the nervous system are failing to carry the load which the owner's method of life has laid upon them. Oft-times an understanding of a defect suggests the remedy ; but there have been false remedies for mankind's ills past any possibility of cataloging. To-day the pharmacist's shelves are cluttered with bottles and boxes, salves, pills and lotions to cure our sicknesses. Thousands upon thousands of men and women spend their lives in the varied and manifold druggings and rubbings, feedings, bathings and operatings that the sick may be cured; not to mention the suggestors and profes- sional prayers for health and prolongation of days. In principle, we find that this intricate array of remedies and remediators can be surprisingly simplified. Failure of body can be met by only two possible rational adjustments. First, the load may be lightened, the surroundings simplified. 22 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY This is the method almost universally suggested by both lay and medical advisers. Oddly, we don't treat our sunflower so. When we want it to thrive, we enrich its soil, increase its sunshine, water it more freely and thereby quadruple its work. For the sunflower, we instinctively realize that while we can do much to helpfully modify its surroundings, the plant within its own cells must work out its own salvation. This thought leads us directly to the second means of maintaining the balance which stands for normal living the methods to be emphasized in the following pages, methods which demand the individual's increase in vital capacity. All that the most complex medica- tion and health regimen can do for emperor or pauper is to relieve the burden under which the individual struggles, or to increase the individual's power to successfully carry his burden. Most of us are living sadly underpower, and most of us unnaturally age in body, mind, or spirit because we so live. Living underpower results from misuse or disuse of our bodies. How rare the individual who utilizes his strength to its daily full efficiency and is proud in so doing! Few realize the tremendous capacity the healthy, de- veloped body possesses for productive effort. Our ears are so constantly assailed with: "I can't," ''I'm not able," "Doctor told me to be careful," "I never could use my back it was my mother's weakness, too," "I'm afraid it will give me a headache," "My nerves won't stand it," and the rest of the tedious wail, that it would seem the generations of those to whom work is a joy and WHY THE BODY FAILS 23 who find in daily toil the soul-deepening satisfac- tion of right living has been wiped out. Defective Oxidation To maintain a healthy, de- veloped body in its comfort of strength is quite simple. The few essentials are an ample supply of oxygen, adequate foods of simple quality, and the absence of externally or internally produced poisons. The cities are crowded with shallow breathers, while even in the country far too many flat, even hollow, chests are evident. Many men and more women so rarely fully expand their lungs that their chests are sore after the unwonted effort, and they think they have done themselves damage. In America, especially, months are spent in overheated rooms and multitudes dread the breathing of cold air, with the result that pneu- monia ominously increases while the vigorous anti- tuberculosis crusade has but mitigated the relent- less White Plague. We are, however, speaking of the more superficial aspect of deep breathing. The real value of oxygen is for the tissues of the body the blood, brain, muscles, glands. The highest activities of the liver, for instance, are only possible with an ample supply of oxygen. And there can be little question that deficiency of oxygen in the tissues is the most potent single chemical cause of premature old age. Technic- ally, this is spoken of as suboxidation a subject which will merit our frequent reference. We should all understand the underlying prin- ciples of the body's use of its foods. Practically all of these must undergo involved chemical changes before they can be absorbed and enter the 24 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY circulation, which carries nutriment to the tissues. Ordinary milk, for instance, must first be curdled in the stomach by rennin, thus separating the dif- ferent elements of which it is composed. The gastric juices later digest these curds, transform- ing them into a sour, bitter fluid called peptone, a fluid almost offensive to taste and smell, yet the foundation of nutrition. The fats, sugars and starches also pass thru diverse changes before they are ready to be utilized by the tissues. All these foods, after digestion, are absorbed and car- ried by the blood and lymph to the microscopic tissue-cells. The bulk of these is a very wonderful substance called protoplasm, a complex jelly-like material which is, in fact, a marvelous chemical laboratory. Protoplasm absorbs the food brought to it, and also takes up oxygen from the red blood cells. The food and oxygen if properly balanced now combine to liberate energy. If chemically balanced, this combination is perfect, otherwise it is defective. As is the health of our billions of body cells, so is the health of the individual. The exigencies of life are such that this balance must often be temporarily imperfect; then poisonous products are formed. The never sleeping kidneys and the vigilant four-pound liver can take care of a large amount of food-poisons due to overfeeding or underexercising, and so long as they are able to protect the system from accumulations of such toxins, the individual may be considered well, even in the face of years of unwise habits. Subacidosis Sometimes thru two, or even three, generations the liver and kidneys ward off mer- .WHY THE BODY FAILS 25 ited damage. But no matter how great the vital- ity of the parent stock, son or grandson, assuredly great-grandson, will pay the penalty. No com- putometer can reveal the damage done to the human family from the poisons of unmerited eat- ing. When food-oxidation becomes defective, def- inite chemical irritants circulate in the system to impair the efficiency of the tissues, to reduce the body's reserve of vitality. A certain percentage of alkalinity is a vital necessity ; a small degree of positive acidity means rapid death. To prevent such a possibility, the healthy body carries an ; ample reserve of alkaline, or, more chemically speaking, basic salts. In these days of overeating and underoxidation thousands are being damaged because of their lessened alkaline reserve, a con- dition more scientifically termed, subacidosis. And from the laboratory standpoint subacidosis is for humanity a too frequent yet largely re- movable producer of early old age. The body misused thru unwise feeding expresses its resentment in a long list of ills. Trouble be- gins early as in cholera infantum and the scurvy of infancy. The very common constipation, chronic indigestion and even appendicitis, have been charged to this account. Unquestionably, several of the skin diseases, as acne, psoriasis and eczema, with many cases of anaemia, the incurable cirrhosis of the liver and the gruesomely fatal Bright 's disease, are likewise produced. The same error is probably the soil in which incapacitating rheumatism, offensive pyorrhea and most gall- stones have their origin. Nutritional sins also in- \ 26 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY fhience unquestionably disturbances of the thyroid gland and are behind most cases of nervousness and much insanity. Hardening of the arteries, with its long list of fatal and aging effects, includ- ing paralysis, angina pectoris and certain forms of softening of the brain, are, without question, penalties we pay for misuse of foods. The vi- ciousness of auto-intoxication, as this self-poison- F ing is called, is unmitigated. Protection is certainly superior to abuse, but right use is infinitely superior to both. Use is the law underlying the perfect health of all tissues. But even in face of the vivid revelations of the Great War, ours is still a nation of underused bodies. Muscular tissue forms the bulk of our physical selves. The muscles of athletes and the millions who earn their bread by physical strength utilize these pounds of flesh as furnaces in which carbon and oxygen combine to form power, energy and vitality. It is only by active use of muscles that we truly breathe. We may take deep breath- ing exercises until we are giddy with oxygen in- toxication and increase but a small fraction the total amount of oxygen in the body tissues. Put the muscles to work and the demand for deep breathing is instant, the kind of deep breathing that sends invigorating health-supplying oxygen to every recess of the body, adding to the vital activity of each cell. The heart and vessels, the stomach and intestines and many glands contain muscular tissue which can only be exercised in- directly. We can command our leg muscles to jump us up and down until they are wearied. Our WHY THE BODY FAILS 27 heart muscle is oblivious, beating calmly on in the face of our commands, but note its action after a minute of vigorous use of leg muscles it has doubled its activity and thus, thru the voluntary, we exercise the involuntary. Give the body sufficient muscular use and thru perfect oxidation few toxins will be produced and many of these will be promptly neutralized. So with intelligent use the body is largely relieved from the threat of auto-intoxication. This being so, muscular underuse, the almost universal temptation of well-to-do maturity in man, and of late adolescence in women, is the most damaging misuse that can open the door to old age at forty. Physically speaking, therefore, premature old age is a result of auto-intoxication, or suboxida- tion, or, more frequently, of a combination of both. There is another cause which, with our present knowledge, may be regarded as accidental. This results from the various infectious diseases : scar- let fever, typhoid, syphilis, tuberculosis, chronic absorption of septic matter from unrecognized sources, as apparently healthy teeth and tonsils. But medical science is making rapid strides in its understanding of all germ-produced diseases and has already added several years to the average length of life by its advancing mastery over diph- theria, typhoid, yellow fever and other infections. CHAPTER IV FOOD THAT WRECKS Food Facts The body continues to live because it is constantly being supplied with oxygen and food. The body is aptly referred to as a most per- fect engine for converting oxygen and carbon into heat and energy, which it does with far less waste than any machine of man's making. Moreover, the marvelous principle of life appropriates mate- rials from the outer world for producing a life- time of saving heat and an enormous output of energy. It accumulates substance for years of body-growth, and thruout its days provides a reserve for the prompt replacement of worn-out material. In a most remarkable degree the body is self-developing and self-repairing. We all realize that of the elements taken into the human system, oxygen is the most vital. Without it, in a few minutes life ceases to be. Food is a close second. Even for the strong man a limited num- ber of foodless days and he is lifeless. Viewed from the pleasure standpoint, Nature's liberality and man's genius have provided an al- most unending list of new and gratifying dishes to stimulate, and keep gustatory pleasures unsated. Thanks to Nature's tolerance and the average per- son's reserve of vitality, it is possible for the many 28 POOD THAT WRECKS 29 to overindulge in food, or to adapt themselves year after year to foods which are largely poison-pro- ducing. For many generations early man's food- supply was precarious, and our aborigines' eating- life was largely a matter of food and famine. Thereby, for the race a large tolerance to ex- cess was developed, a tolerance which to-day ex- plains the ability of the average person to eat unwisely wtih apparent immunity for many years. The mystery of continuous generations ap- proximating a standard, the uninterrupted repro- duction thruout ages of kind by its kind, has been explained in part by the theory of germ- plasm. Into the original cells, from which the in- dividual is to be created, has been placed an ele- ment which determines the species the form, size, color and numerous qualities of the offspring, qualities absolute, which no act of his can radically modify. The stature of any one of us, whether we shall attain four-feet-six or six-feet-four, can be but moderately influenced by over or underfeeding. Still scientific feeding will gradually, within lim- itations, improve the individual, and generations of scientific feeding, with balanced exercise, will work wonders in the perfection of growth. Deep, thrillingly deep, as science has entered in- to the intricacies of life, the complex, delicate chemistry of the human body still hides many un- solved mysteries. An immense amount of tedious and complicated investigation faces the physio- logic chemist with problems as profound and baffling as have yet been unravelled, before we can understand clearly, step by step, the changes in- 30 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY tervening between the morsel of bacon and the substance of the muscle-cell, between a crumb of bread and a poet's dream. Unhappily, this realm of the unknown leaves the way open for a large variety of personal opinions, for more or less shrewd guesses or physiologic theories. Hence we find a variety of schools proclaiming that this is fit to eat and that is not; teachers advocating unlimited use of juicy rare beef; others classing beef, tobacco and alcohol in one villainous group. Vegetarianism is rife; while diets of grapes or buttermilk or nuts or raw eggs are advocated as the only way of life. These various schools of eating, with the woeful chorus of dyspeptics and the flaming, ubiquitous advertisement of tablets and elixirs guaranteed to make eating safe, pro- claim the fact that multitudes have solved their digestive problems poorly. Very much of exact knowledge, however, is pos- sessed by our wise men, sufficient in fact to suc- i cessfully direct the great majority of the wrongly ; fed to health. The following principles should be as much a part of the mental equipment of the in- telligent individual as the multiplication table. There is undoubtedly an unfortunate minority for whom a little learning is dangerous, but as a rule the emphasis is so markedly on the " little" and so slight on the " learning" that we accept them as practically all emotionalists and not rational thinkers. It is with them, for instance, the large element of fear, not their limited knowledge of the danger of proteid decomposition, which makes them sure that ominous ailments lurk in raw eggs. FOOD THAT WBECKS 31 The Value and Danger of Proteins Years ago investigators were able to reduce man's ten thou- sand foods to four classes the proteins, the fats, the sugars and starches termed the carbohyd- rates and the minerals. A sixteen course ban- quet, with viands from the far ends of the earth, consists chemically of but these four groups, even as does a bowl of bread and milk. The bulk of the body is water, most of the balance is protein. This substance is absolutely necessary to make tissues such as brain, muscle and glands. There can be little growth without protein, while the re- pair and replacement of tissue following use and injury depends on protein. Heat and energy can also be derived from this most important food- group. So were we unfortunately limited to a single food-element, the protein would be our wise choice. Nature has distributed it well. Lean meats from all sources are rich in protein, as are also peas and beans. A large amount is found in eggs, and in much of the solid elements of milk, especially in the different forms of cheese. Much smaller percentages occur in cereals, whole wheat flour containing much more than white flour, while there are small amounts in fruits and nuts. Among civilized nations to-day, the abuse, through overuse, of the proteins is probably the most aggravated, damaging eating habit, hasten- ing the steps of old age. An awakening to this danger is unquestionably occurring, but unfor- tunately there are many anti-meat food-cranks whose rantings the conservative will merely ig- nore. The question must, however, have two 32 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY sides; let us reasonably look at them both. Pro- tein is essential to growth. Nature is not a vege- tarian ; she gives the new-born baby four per cent, protein, no matter what the baby's mother eats, and without that four per cent, the baby cannot thrive four, however, not forty ! And for many years, if the child is to grow, if stature and brain and vital organs are to increase, protein from some source must be obtained. Moreover, if the individual lives on through his life-time a muscle- worker, a certain amount of protein must be taken daily to make good the wear and tear of physical labor. So, the logger, the farmer, the athlete, the hod-carrier, the smith, the miner and the locomo- tive fireman, the hunter, the able-bodied seaman the active muscle-worker, wherever found, needs and utilizes, in fact, practically depends on a diet with considerable meat or some other form of this valuable food-element. Let us reduce it all to a sentence. Protein, after maturity, is essentially a muscle-worker's food, but a menace to the brain worker and the physically inactive. Science and death certificates are saying, with increasing emphasis : In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat meat. The large majority of the readers of this book are not earners of protein they are brain-work- ers ; and within these pages there will be few more constructive truths than that the food-needs of brain-workers and muscle-workers are distinctly different. After growth is attained, practically all women, and ninety-five per cent, of profes- sional, business and clerical men should definitely FOOD THAT WRECKS 33 , restrict their use of foods rich in protein. In- creased physical efficiency, clarity and accuracy of thought, comfort of moods, and in a large sense peace and good-will, result from such a wise re- duction. Quite comparable are the changes to those which follow the relinquishing of unneeded alcohol or tobacco. In our land the damage to life and efficiency from proteid intoxication is un- questionably much in excess of that arising from alcoholic abuse. Examples in every neighborhood illustrating this claim stand in evidence. Farm- ers' wives throng our insane asylums not pri- marily because of remoteness from neighbors, but as the result of the brain-damaging effects of a continuous diet which, while giving their husbands strength and vitality and large energy and health the husbands who labor from dawn to dusk is a diet too proteid-rich for their much lighter fem- inine activities. Many thousands of successful men financially, professionally, artistically, started life at the bottom. They worked in shop, store, on farm or in warehouse. They labored with their muscles long hours for years. At forty they are bankers, ministers, lawyers, editors, photog- raphers, office men, merchants, stockbrokers, finan- ciers using now brain and nerves much, and muscles as little as possible. For all such lives the threat of early and disorganizing damage to the vital processes is held back by the integrity of two kidneys and one liver. Subacidosis creeps in, efficiency and health slip away, and age is upon us ere youth is well past. The day is at hand when lack of intelligence will 34 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY no longer unnecessarily curtail lives; defective wills alone are to be responsible. While science has increased the average length of life several years, this gain has been in saving those under thirty. Even so, statistics reveal the alarming fact that the life expectancy for successful men over forty has dropped several years during the last generation. Proteid abuse, unhappily, an- swers the "Why this untimely failure?" in the health of thousands of useful men and women. Use and Misuse of Fats Proteins, fats and carbo-hydrates may all be utilized in our body- furnace to produce and approximate the 98.6 temperature so necessary to health and indeed to continuance of life. Chilly days normally increase our need for richer diet ; still, it is a common ex- perience to overuse greasy foods even in hot weather. Whale blubber practically pure fat is the Eskimo's ideal of delectable food. He needs it that he may generate heat to make toler- able his Arctic zeros, as well as to wrap his sensory nerve endings in a protective, comfort-lending in- sulation of fat. The explorer north or south of the polar circles wisely provides himself with pemmi- can a mixture containing a large proportion of fat. A good covering of adipose is usually equal to an average overcoat by day or blanket by night, and is truly for anyone a conserver of body heat. Oddly, our miracle-working chemical selves are able, when properly acting, to convert any of the food elements into a reserve of fat a reserve which, in moderation, not only stands for normal digestive activity and a thrifty reserve of energy, FOOD THAT WRECKS 35 but contributes to our symmetry and appearance. There are many striking exceptions to the gen- eral rule that the underweights and the over- weights, both, are deficient in vitality. Still, in- surance companies are very strict in the matter of a reasonable nearness of their applicants to the standard relation of weight to height. Most of us worry our dear mothers in our early days because we are "too thin," while by forty we are distress- ing ourselves or our husbands because we are "too stout." Two reasons explain most of childhood's slenderness: youthful activity and defective fat digestion. We find that few children are system- atically taught to utilize the fatty foods. In fact, fat indigestion remains common during the life- time of many, thru digestive injuries caused in youth by excess of grease, and specially by the use of overheated grease in the preparation of their foods. Among the more commonly used fatty foods are lard, butter, and their many substitutes, cream, all fat meats, olive-oil, salad oil, most nuts and the yolk of eggs. Fats are the richest of all eatables, weight for weight possessing nearly twice the food value of either of the other groups. They are not digested in the stomach, and their misuse is one of the commonest sources of intestinal indigestion. Certain forms of fat, especially those derived from the hog, and certainly all fats when their acids have been produced by overheating thru ignorant cooking, are extremely difficult for the average digestion. Their use, however, greatly facilitates and simplifies the art of much cooking and unques- 36 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY tionably adds to the toothsomeness and crispness of many dishes. The heavier greases are fit only for the rugged digestion of sturdy men who work exposed and require quantities of heat-producing food. For milady and her children and for milady's husband and for the majority of modern men, foods which have been saturated with hot grease, whether commonly fried or more aristo- cratically sautes, are regularly eaten only with risk. Many men and women, even some whose occupations demand much activity, remain thin and undernourished, semi-anaemic, dyspeptic, pessimistic victims of the lard bucket. Pork therefore becomes scientifically the laboring man's food, and the digestive integrity of multitudes of children is to-day being threatened by unwise use of this rich, highly organized fat-proteid combina- tion. The overuse of fats as related to the body's need for such food, disturbs both stomach and in- testinal digestion, makes possible the decomposi- tion of proteins and the fermentation of starches. It is the wrong use of them which has decided for millions a life-time of thinness, lowered vitality and badly discounted physical reserve. The detrimental action of tardily digested fats on the chemical changes of other food groups is the un- doubted cause of much subacidosis. The Value of Sugars and Starches While all foods may be utilized for the production of energy, the muscular system is truly the body's dynamo where food and oxygen are converted into thrill- ing, pulsating, usable force. A healthy muscular system is actually the body's vitality producer. FOOD THAT WRECKS 37 When in condition it is able to utilize all whole- some foods, no matter what their type. But how few of us have kept our energy producers in order ! How exceptional is the muscularly developed man ; how rare the well-muscled woman even in early maturity! How very unusual to find snappy muscles in early old age ! The large majority al- low this force-producing dynamo to soon fall into practical disuse. Still, into our bodies goes, day after day, pound after pound of unused food un- used because of our idle, flabby, sedentary muscles. The sugars and starches are the most simply ap- propriated by the healthy body, and the adult who uses his muscles right each day, even for but a short time, will probably, while living on a diet consisting largely of carbohydrates, most nearly approximate that ideal of mechanics a perfect internal combustion-engine. Most completely will he oxidize and utilize all he eats, with the minimum of harmful residue. There is a large choice of the carbohydrates : the cereals, especially wheat, corn, rice, oats, barley; many vegetables, including Irish potatoes, turnips and parsnips, are examples of the starches. All forms of sugar, honey, many fruits, especially grapes, bananas, figs and dates, with certain veg- etables, as beets and sweet potatoes, illustrate the sugars. Properly prepared, these groups offer the most quickly utilized form of energy known in the realm of foods. For thousands of years sweets were rare and the race developed a strong, inherited desire for them. This is shown in the so-called " instinct for sweets," so common in 38 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY children. And wreckage lurks in the seduction of the unnumbered " goodies " with which all too many children are fed, to the exclusion of simpler and safer foods. Excess of sweets tends to acetic acid fermentation; and many sour stomachs are literally vinegar saturated. On the other hand, the reasonable use of "sweetening" is, for those who are living normally, a wholesome addition to the diet. But to allow children to eat their full of candies, pies, cakes, preserves, molasses-satur- ated biscuit or grease-soaked, syrup-dripping griddle-cakes is to early sow the seeds of digestive debility which so often in later years brings forth a crop of life-shortening disorders. The value of properly cooked starches as the bulk of the brain- worker's diet is as yet unrecog- nized by the majority. The most healthy man of fifty known to the writer, a professional man of large interests, states that the bulk of his diet is Irish potatoes, and as these can be prepared in two hundred different ways he never lacks variety, though he prefers them baked. This man's hered- ity was not good, his start as a boy was poor. He early realized the common damage of unwise eat- ing. In simple, rational food he has found rare health. The starches ferment easily and produce con- siderable gas. This is harmless and perfectly natural and infinitely safer than the putrefactive changes common in an imperfectly utilized protein diet. The primary reason for food is the production of energy, but we use it too largely, these days of FOOD THAT WEECKS 39 plenty, for pleasure. Foods normally utilized make for increasing vitality and longevity. Foods unneeded clutter the system, waste vital energy and bring to an untimely end unreckoned thou- sands of valued lives. CHAPTER V PLEASURE OR PROFIT IN EATING Palate or Principle? The ascetic was wrong. He more often failed to find the living God whom we can only sense when manifested in the souls of our neighbors, than does the average man or woman. By denying the flesh and living in gloom and hunger he could but shut out much of the Spirit of Good. Science and experience are at one in deciding that appetite, the attendant of hunger, when normal, ranks high in the legitimate plea- sures of life. It is the first gratification instinct discovers, and usually the last the mind relin- quishes. In the animal kingdom, food-desire ranks prob- ably stronger than fear in the process of domestic- ation, and practically all the virtues of our animal- pets rest in their dependence upon their masters for food. Excepting only man's need for air, he knows no other inciter to activity more persist- ently returning, no more relentless disturber of his comfort when denied, than food-desire. And beneficently a high and almost unflagging pleasure has been associated with eating. For the normal person there should be few meals in the span of fourscore years which do not stand for enjoyment, if the cooks know how to cook and the eater to eat. The mumps, measles and chicken-pox should 40 PLEASURE OR PROFIT IN EATING 41 constitute the sum of interruptions. The lay- recognition of the normality of food-desire is such as to constitute the average man's standard of health. If he has a good appetite, all is well. If he is "off his feed" he insists upon his need for help. Constituted as human beings are, with a large proportion of activity-craving muscle muscle capable of rivaling in endurance even the wild animals an instinct for "rich foods" was inher- ent. We have seen how this instinct is highly de- veloped in the many who labor physically during their early years. While, thru disease and abuse and misuse, there are many exceptions, the aver- age man at forty, and his wife, too, will choose heavy, rich dishes representing the foods needed only by the extremely active. On many a family dinner-table, surrounded by a brain-working father, a tongue-working mother, a piano-working daughter, and two sedentary and abnormally un- deractive boys, will be served the following : soup, thick as gravy; steaming, fragrant roast pork, garnished with candied apples; sweet potatoes fried in grease; hot biscuits, piping hot, so the chunk of butter will melt and saturate them to the crust ; cold slaw, probably served with sugar and vinegar ; mince pie and cheese and a cup of coffee around just a family dinner with no company frills, a dinner which would stagger the digestive strength of a stone-mason ! But Mrs. Wife says, "One thing is certain, I do give my family the best of food. They are all so thin that they need it. I never skimp there." 42 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY The writer sat facing a many-times millionaire, one of the third generation of America's world- famed rich families, a man who usually traveled in his private car, but was making this eighteen- hour trip in a Pullman; a man barely fifty, who could have had the best any people or clime could give ; a man who was accounted highly educated. He was slender of body, almost effeminate in the mildness of his physical activities, yet his break- fast, ordered by his secretary and which he ate alone, consisted of four hot waffles soaked with syrup, two chops and two cups of coffee. His foot- man met him at the station, relieved him of his overcoat, and respectfully followed by his two servants, this financial giant, languidly exercising with his cane, walked slowly, very slowly up the steps to his landau. It could not have been that disorderly breakfast. It must have resulted from' years of ignorant or was it indulgent eating? but this was his last meal in a Pullman. Within ten days he was operated for appendicitis most skilfully, and cared for most perfectly. But care and skill and millions were of little avail. Within the week he was gone "snatched in his prime" the headlines said. But what sort of a prime was it that could not react from a simple, uncomplicated appendix operation? What sort of heart and kidneys were his that could not stand the strain, that could not, with all scientific help, carry their owner thru so usual an experience? The term "prime" could probably never have truly applied to this man. And barely fifty in years he died as old men die. He had grown old PLEASURE OE PROFIT IN EATING 43 untimely, as definitely self -poisoned as tho ' he had been for years a drug-user. The Vital Food-Exercise Balance We all realize how food-habits grow, and how thousands of indi- viduals live on to old age daily violating in their eating the rational principles of dietetic chemistry. Some of us can get used to most anything. Still we must remember the poor farmer's horse which, prodded by hunger and deluded by green glasses, had just about learned to eat straw when he died. Few indeed who are reading these pages thru a sense of need for health but should make some more or less revolutionary changes in their habits of diet. And after middle life almost any change in this department seems, for the time, grievous. Perverted tastes and appetites spurn reason. They have a logic of their own which doggedly de- fies reason. We recall an anemic, dyspeptic min- ister whose periodic attacks of "acid-burning in- digestion," could only be relieved by slices of iced cucumber, dressed in salt and vinegar ! Incident- ally, this gentle divine's incapacitating "stomach disturbances" were always the result of taking food away from home which he didn't "like"! And more than incidentally, he was almost raven- ously fond of cucumbers. Most learnedly he rea- soned on things of the hereafter, but of the affairs of his stomach, never. It will probably be many generations before out- rageously toxic-producing food-combinations cease to be served under the guise of entertainment. Many conglomerations a la Newberg represent equally culinary skill, wasteful expense and diet- 44 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY etic ignorance. And to-day expense and culinary skill stand for social excellence, even as does di- etetic ignorance. Underneath it all, relentlessly, destructively, constructively, flows on the inexor- able law that the maintenance of physical health, the forcing back of old age into its divinely ap- pointed years is for the race, for families and for most individuals, a question of the maintenance of the uncompromising relation of eating to work- ing, of feeding to doing is, when all else is said, [the vital food-exercise balance. For the great majority of men and women who would remain efficient and this means happy and worthy thru their sixties, a deep-dyed decision must be made at forty, a decision which recognizes, and in daily life honors, this modern expression of the Bible's first health command. The very first step in profitable eating is to ac- cept simplicity in food as representing choice. Let it be a definite resolution for you and your household that rich dishes shall be expurgated. This will relegate to the innocuous many of the Madam's choice recipes, while the omission of mince pie and plum-pudding, pork and pickles, fried foods, fudge and hot, white flour bread, with syrupy desserts, highly seasoned soups and sauces, and grease-saturated vegetables, would seem to many a housewife like taking the bread out of her family's mouth. For the many, such ad- justment will be difficult for perverted digestion craves its toxin-producers as the native does his 1 'hasheesh." Distorted appetites almost revolt at a diet of wholesome simples, but if resolution PLEASURE OR PROFIT IN EATING 45 sustains decision, two or three weeks of sincere effort will find desire whetted for a whole-wheat- bread-and-milk luncheon, where formerly at least three substantial courses were demanded. With- in a few months of wholesome, simple food-using most distorted tastes may be cured, and the indi- vidual grow to instinctively reject dishes that are dietetically threatening. Quite recently a learned, serious-minded, pro- fessionally noted food-specialist of New York, a physician limiting his practice to the treatment of digestive disorders, has announced as his opinion that our one gustatory sin is the heterogeneous combinations which comprise our meals, and he objects specially to the mixtures of starches and sugars with proteins, on the ground that the form- er are much more easily oxidized than the latter. Thus they rob the proteins of the oxygen needed for their proper assimilation, and thereby make possible protein decomposition the basis of auto- intoxication. Therefore he advocates the use of proteins and avoidance of starches and sugars. The doctor is unquestionably right in advocating simpler meals. Much overeating is due to the cleverness with which we successively tickle one corner of our appetite after another by multiplied courses of an endless variety of foods. Simpler diet truly is needed in most homes. However, it is regrettable that this food-specialist did not pur- sue his reasoning to its logical end. Man was given taste and teeth and digestive apparatus for all classes of food, and when the sugars and starches disturb protein digestion by using up the 46 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY available oxygen the intimation is strong that the individual is ''shy" of oxygen. The doctor is surely right for those who refuse or are unable to quadruple their oxygen-supply. The rest of us will exercise muscles more and teeth less and twice a day saturate our cell-protoplasm with all the oxygen it can absorb and mix our starches and proteins as we wish. Water, Salt and Bran For the toxic and over- nourished, two daily meals are advisable, break- fast and evening dinner ; for the average sedentary man and woman and most brain-workers, two-and- a-half meals are better the half representing, of course, a light noon luncheon. Muscle-workers need three meals, all hearty ones. The under- nourished, the thin, anemic, weak-digesting kind should take five or six luncheons, really, rather than meals. Thus feeding should be tempered to folks. Less food, more water for most of us. It is only the misinformed who, to-day, fear to mix water-drinking and eating not that fluids should be used to encourage poor chewing or rapid eat- ing, but a glass of cold water for each fifty pounds of body-weight may be taken each meal with ben- efit. The addition of a thin slice of lemon to each glass of drinking water is peculiarly helpful to those who have a tendency to overacidity. For let us remember that the citric acid of oranges and lemons normally becomes an alkaline citrate in the body-fluids, thus adding to our valuable reserve of alkali. Remember, too, that the addition of sugar to these fruits defeats this benefit, for excess of PLEASURE OR PROFIT IN EATING 47 sugar increases fermentation and the formation of acetic acid, which decidedly interferes with stomach digestion. Excess of salt undoubtedly seriously decreases the fluidity of the blood and has been most straightly accused of being one of the irritants responsible for early hardening of the arteries. Much more water, then, and much less salt ! White pepper only, never red nor black and forget to use it often ! Food as prepared in the modern kitchen is much too soluble. It leaves an abnormally small residue to be excreted an explanation of the great preval- ence of constipation always a discomfort, often an evil. Excepting in rare cases where the habit of using strong cathartics is confirmed, two changes will speedily relieve this condition, the first of which is the addition of one heaping table- spoonful of wheat-bran for each fifty pounds of weight. This should be taken daily, not as food, but to supply what the farmer calls, "roughness." He knows his stock must have it if they are to be healthy. Any clean, coarse wheat-bran may be used. It can be much improved in flavor by toast- ing until it is brown and crisp. Enough can be prepared in a few minutes to last a month, if kept in a fruit jar or well-covered receptacle. The bran may be added to any breakfast food, or moistened with cream, and a dash of salt added, taken for lunch or at bedtime. Bran does not need chewing in fact, it can only be chewed at, and the quickest way of appropriating it, when not mixed with other food, is to wash it down, preferably with milk, though water will do. The daily habit 48 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY of using bran cannot be too strongly recommended for all troubled with intestinal sluggishness. This habit, if associated with the second help the strengthening of the involuntary muscles of the digestive tract which follows the daily active use of the voluntary muscles, recommended in other chap- ters will permanently relieve constipation for the large majority. The cravings of appetite, that autocrat whom so few think of resisting, develop almost inevitably thru food-misuse, and it requires a world of res- olution to throttle this usurper. To dally with the things we like after our reason warns that their use is unwise, is but to prolong the struggle. A determined adjusting of eating to our legitimate food-needs, sincerely undertaken, will reduce the acute contest to a matter of weeks, almost of days. And the appetite-problem will rapidly become one of real simplicity, and its control a matter of ease if we plant deep our determination to make eating attendant upon our true food-requirements. The two consummating victories, then, which will most certainly augment the quality of our physical youth and preserve it thru the years, may be re- duced to this sentence: Exercise every muscle every day till it hurts; intelligently and honestly adjust your eating to your work. Practical Food Helps In view of the foregoing exposition of the underlying food-exercise prin- ciples, the following sententious condensations may be permitted. Many are too thin. They need to have their lungs examined, and their blood- infecting tonsils removed and diseased gums and PLEASUBE OK PROFIT IN EATING 49 teeth radically treated. Most of the thin, how- ever, must acquire a fat-digesting ability. The stomach does not digest fats the intestines do. An imperfect stomach-digestion interferes with the work of the intestines, therefore often the whole digestive process needs help. Cream is the easiest fat to learn to handle. It and raw eggs are the chief dependence for increasing weight when patients are on rest-cure. The overacid stomachs so universal with meat and candy eaters, or, in fact, with all habitually using rich foods, in- terfere disconcertingly with the free use of milk. That milk and later cream may be helpfully taken, therefore, stomach acidity should be system- atically neutralized. The discontinuance of meats and sweets will almost automatically do this, while the addition of twenty-five to fifty per cent, of Vichy-water to all milk taken will make it possible for one to soon use it in fattening quantities. This means at least a quart of good-quality milk to each fifty pounds of body-weight daily. Later, one, then two, finally three and even four ounces of cream may be added to each quart of milk. When this is being comfortably cared for it is time to add raw eggs. At the start refiningly repudiate all unwholesome mental associations connected with uncooked eggs, for such associations are legion. Then even candled eggs carefully broken into a small glass, sprinkled with a half-teaspoonful of lemon juice arid swallowed with yolk unbroken, can be recklessly tossed down like the movie- villain does his whiskey and the trick is done! Nothing slips down more smoothly than a raw egg 50 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY when one has discarded his antagonisms and in- hibitions. Three a day for two weeks, then six ultimately, if needed, a dozen and weight will come, unless there is some undiscovered organic defect, or one is disconcerting his digestive ap- paratus by impossible food-combinations. The writer has seen rest-treatment patients under trained supervision thrive on two dozen, even on thirty eggs a day little five-foot-five women, too, not seven-foot giants. Milk and eggs used as sug- gested with, of course, adequate oxidation will almost invariably increase avoirdupois. Six feedings a day are advisable for the thin. Abso- lute discontinuance of tobacco helps much. Very different the stout one's problem. With him all classes of food tend to be converted into undesired pounds. Sugar, starches and fats, par- ticularly add to weight, and woe it is for the fat man ! There is no royal road upon which he may attain symmetry. Grace cometh only thru suffer- ing. He must drink but half the fluids he craves, and most of the long list of good things he so en- joys must be dutifully put behind him. Green vegetables, lean fish and lean meats, with three times the amount of exercise prescribed for the average man, will unquestionably effect remark- able results. Unhappily, surplus energy and sur- plus avoirdupois are not usually associated, and as the business of reducing is protracted thru many years, successes in attenuation are excep- tional. The following succinct program may be taken as a model for Mr. Brain-worker and the members PLEASURE OR PROFIT IN EATING 51 of his family and it is for them particularly that saving help is so vitally needed. Get fit first. Make a good job of this. Six months devoted to it should prolong active life six years. Then start, physically, seven days a week, with a viciously strenuous quarter of an hour. Such viciousness produces the highest type of lawfulness. Your weight being average, the following diet sugges- tions will apply. You have taken one glass of water when you finished exercising. You drink two more at breakfast. You have fresh grapes (including seeds) or baked apple, a sugarless orange, grapefruit or equivalent in the alkali-pro- ducing fruits. Then a generous bowl of oatmeal or other breakfast-food with a quarter pint of good cream and one teaspoonful of sugar. A few dates or half a fig or other fruits may be added to the breakfast-food for variety. As a rule, the un- cooked cereals will be preferred in summer and the cooked, in winter. Follow with a goodly Irish potato, baked, boiled, dressed with white sauce, riced, mashed, steamed but not fried in any form, one or two thin rashers of bacon, a sliver of mack- erel or, especially in winter, a soft-cooked egg, two slices of toast and a cup of mild coffee, moderately sweetened and well-creamed. Something is de- cidedly wrong with the individual's stomach or head who does not comfortably digest this break- fast. One, better two miles' genuine walking should bring one to his office in perfect condition. The best work hours will then follow, with unin- terrupted application to business from nine to one. The half-meal comes for luncheon. A pint of 52 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY good milk and a quarter of a loaf of whole-wheat bread two or three days old is a perfect noon-day meal. In cold weather a bowl of soup and a sand- wich side-stepping the ham or another soft- cooked egg, or a half-stew during oyster season, or a light salad may be alternated for variety. A twenty-minute nap is now worth from five to one hundred dollars, depending upon one's bank bal- ance. Twenty minutes, helps, thirty, doesn't, forty, hurts! If work calls for four hours' more application it should now be easily given. Two or three miles of thoroughly brisk walking, or a half-hour vigorously spent with the medicine-ball, or an hour in the gymnasium, cavorting and sweat- ing, should intervene between work and dinner. And dinner may be a feast. A good meal has been earned. It may start, in hot weather, with a cold soup, the rest of the year with a thin stock or cream soup. Red meat may follow twice a week, fish, poultry, game, or the lighter sea-foods for the other days potatoes again, always those Irish potatoes with their gift of potash, and one or two other vegetables devoid of grease. A mild fruit- punch or sherbet adds much to the dinner course. A moderate service of a light salad is now in order, avoiding excess of vinegar and high seasoning as in all dishes. A long list of wholesome, simple desserts is available for the wise diner, including fruit-souffles, the various gelatins, tapioca and fruit combinations, ices and frozen custards and creams, even transgressing into the region of ap- ple, huckleberry, blackberry and pumpkin pies, and the simpler puddings. Then a few nuts and one or two after-dinner confections should com- plete a perfect meal for all but gourmands. Toast or whole-wheat bread or corn, bran or whole-wheat muffins may be wisely served. A single cup of cocoa or far-f rom-strong tea or a small mild coffee are allowable, though two glasses of water are much more important. And now for home at its best, with two hours and a half for physical and mental relaxation cards for some, music for others, light reading for many. That beautiful ''children's hour" of the poet will rarely be missed in the perfect home. Still, for those who would keep the mind young, one hour must be reserved for serious, systematic study, outlined more in detail in a later chapter. Of course, there will be social evenings, and thea- tre evenings and lecture evenings, but none of the faithful will seek their beds until they have de- voted ten minutes more to the business of storing up vitality, by repeating, somewhat curtailed, the exercises which so vigorously initiated the day. Thus the wise man may live at once the simple life, the strenuous life, the perfect life. The Question of Alcohol Had this book been written a few years ago, pages would necessarily have been devoted to a discussion of the alcohol question. Science, unsentimental life-insurance, mortuary records, sentiment, criminal records, the gruesome relation between railway, factory and automobile accidents and drinking, the Great War, and probably politics have com- bined to render any lengthy discussion on this subject unnecessary. A few pertinent facts, 54 OLD AT FORTY OB YOUNG AT SIXTY however, may help some of the still doubtful ones. Alcohol is a mocker. Like an opiate, it masks. Many of the autotoxic and nicotin laden find a passing comfort from the nag of these nerve-irri- tants in alcohol. For such, work under the influ- ence of stimulants is apparently easier, though total efficiency is always reduced. Many thou- sands of unprejudiced experiments have proven that for all classes of workers, for day-laborers, for the artisan, dependent upon manual dexterity, thru the various grades of mental workers, the productive output of a given number of hours is always less with alcohol than without it. This efficiency reduction is, of course, more marked in some than in others. Let us not be deceived. Alcohol is alcohol. It is as truly alcohol that makes a social high-ball ac- ceptable as the rumster's dram. It is alcohol in champagne and in the "light wines" for domestic use, in a mint julep and claret-punch and brandy drops, just as it is in blockade-whiskey, French brandy, creme de menthe, or two-and-three-quar- ter's per cent. beer. An ounce of whiskey goes in- to an average "toddy." This represents practic- ally a tablespoonful of pure alcohol. In a course dinner where wine is served the average guest will drink from six to eight ounces again, from a tablespoonful to a tablespoonful and a quarter of pure alcohol. A single stein of average beer rep- resents nearly a tablespoonful and a half of raw alcohol. The milder the drink the more is drunk, as, two steins of beer equal two ' ' toddies. ' ' Elim- inate alcohol from any of the long list of beverages and concoctions brewed in its name, and they would all fall as flat to both the outspoken advo- cates of strong drinks, and to those who wish to be deceived by social camouflage as soda-pop or circus lemonade. No matter how it masquerades, or under what term served, it is alcohol which has perpetuated the almost endless list of " drinks. " In Regard to Smoking Many more thousand men and women too, than are to-day striving against the tantalizing call of drink, find tobacco a problem. And, scientifically, the two problems differ but in degree. The effects desired from these drugs by the majority of alcohol drinkers and tobacco users are in both cases either a tem- porary release from the sense of depression or inadequacy, or a partial escape from irking ten- sion. Some seek false stimulation; others, arti- ficial ease. Physiology reveals the influence of these and related drugs on the sympathetic nerv- ous system, the part of our nervous machine so intimately influencing our feelings. The reasons for the drug cravings, when accurately analyzed, are found rooted in abnormal conditions, largely the result of personal indulgences. Such cravings are pathologic or disease-expressing, not physio- logic, or normal. And for us who would fully live, the determination to cast out the abnormal will be resolute and deep seated. Hence, practically, tobacco-using will be uncompromisingly limited. Undoubtedly the day-laborer, the toughened trap- per, the rugged lumberjack will smoke his dozen pipes unharmed. His nervous system is well nigh immune his body-tissues have long reeked with oxygen! It is not so with Mr. Man-of-affairs whose maximum indulgence should be three mild twenty-minute smokes, or even two during hot weather. If with this temperance, there is still the nagging of an unappeased crave, he will be wise to discontinue tobacco entirely and will soon find himself more comfortable without any, than tantalized by unsatisfying moderation. Mrs. Wife, if possessed of any of the nervous refine- ments of her sex, will indulge in tobacco in any amount only at the cost of increased nervous in- stability. In the question of cigarettes two additional problems are revealed. The insinuating state- ment that the cigarette is the mildest smoke, and the shortest as well, becomes false when the cigar- ette is multiplied by from fifteen to fifty, and doubly false the hour the cigarette smoker begins to inhale. The majority of pipe and cigar users never think of drawing nicotin-laden fumes into the actively absorbing mucous surfaces of lungs and nasal cavities. Inhaling multiplies many times the percentage of nicotin truly entering the smoker's circulation. The use of uninhaled cigar- ettes limited to a half-dozen a day could elicit ob- jection from unreasonable extremists only. But they are rarely thus limited. Moreover, and hero is the second and even more serious objection the cigarette smoker soon realizes that in a few minutes he can secure a definite change in sensa- tion by inhaling three or four chestfuls of cigarette smoke. And more and more does he depend upon this artificial influence in meeting the problems, PLEASURE OR PROFIT IN EATING 57 the irritations, the responsibilities of the day, un- til a slavery to the evanescent false comfort is formed. Multitudes of business men fortify them- selves for an unpleasant business interview by an eagerly inhaled cigarette. Attorneys rush out of the court-room eager for their nicotin bracer be- fore addressing the court. Surgeons have been known to be so enslaved by this seductive help as to detail a nurse to manipulate their cigarettes for them during the strain of operating. The laws of asepsis make it impossible for the poor man to touch the cigarette with his own hands hence his helpless dependence on the nurse. Thru all this do we not see an essential weakening of the smoker's will as are all wills imperfect that grasp the artificial in the face of the difficulties of the day's work? Cigarette dependence is a true slavery. To repeat, then the man who can com- fortably limit his tobacco, year after year, to two or three mild indulgences a day and from this de- rive, as do some, unquestioned comfort, may feel safe in such use of tobacco. For a great majority of others, particularly the nervous, those in whose families exist any taint of mental disorder, for all those of high blood pressure, and the throng who are not satisfied and made comfortable by the temperate use of the weed, larger efficiency will be preserved and total comfort and length of days increased by abstinence. Coal-tar Drugs Alcohol and tobacco are both properly classified as drugs, and in addition to them is a long list of medicines relied upon to change sensation, to relieve pain, produce sleep, to 58 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY alter sensitiveness, to dispel for the time the sense of depression. Of this long list two groups to-day are most commonly abused, both of which are chemical products of coal-tar. Aspirin, phenace- tin, acetanilid are easily purchased either in pow- der or tablet form, and, more or less disguised as headache and neuralgia cures, are used most thoughtlessly by many families. Recklessly are these powerful drugs swallowed for even minor discomforts by many, impatient of pain. And even more powerful is the second group the so- called hypnotics or sleep-powders, as veronal, tri- onal and similar chemicals. Without exception, these substances, even in small doses, influence potently the centers governing the circulation. There are conditions in the system in which even ordinary doses of the ''harmless'* coal-tar drugs have proven fatal. They should be taken only when prescribed by a trustworthy physician. But the real message for the intelligent person lies not so much in the damage of occasional dosage of strong drugs as in the fact that head- aches, neuralgias and sleepless nights are warn- ings not to be hushed by drugs, but to be intelli- gently investigated, the causes found, and the wrong habits of living altered. Of the two ways of life that of the drug-user will be shorter and his total efficiency less than that of the disciple of sane living. The Dyspeptic's Primer The following truths are worthy of memorizing by the dyspeptic : The untrained palate is as insistent and unrea- soning as an undisciplined child. PLEASURE OR PROFIT IN EATING 59 Indigestion is usually the remorse of a guilty palate. Fear and stomach-consciousness are the true causes underlying nervous indigestion. Chemically speaking, sweets are not always sweet, and sour is not always acid. The richer the food, the poorer it ^s for the brain-worker. Eat, drink water, and be merry. There are thirty feet of intestines which inevit- ably become sluggish without an insoluble resi- duum in the food. Eighty per cent, of "gas on the stomach" re- sults from the air-swallowing habit; the other twenty per cent, from perfectly normal chemical reactions, absolutely harmless. The habit of repeated "belching of gas" belongs only to air-swallowers. Offensive breath has three sources: defective teeth, diseased tonsils, or a stomach infected with the germs of putrefaction. Each of these condi- tions stands for chronic self -poisoning and merits rigorous dental or medical attention. Few human ailments respond so quickly to ra- tional treatment as indigestion. CHAPTEE VI THE EASE THAT DESTKOYS Drifters, Gamblers, Stewers, Builders Some- time or other most of us indulge ourselves by classifying our neighbors, imitating Nature, prob- ably, which groups them into whites, blacks, yel- lows, browns and reds. From the viewpoint of habits which harden into character, clearness may be served by a vivid grouping of folks into the Drifters, the Gamblers, the Stewers and the Builders. We have neighbors who drift with the current, rarely planning beyond to-day, minimizing effort, asserting themselves only negatively thus offer- ing opposition to progress, indolently floating down life's stream, to be lost in the Sea of Noth- ingness, or finally cast up as driftwood. Theirs is the ease which destroys. Quite different the Gamblers, to whom life is a game of chance. We all know them the men and women who are ever willing to "take a shot," to match wits with chance, to stake any possession against a turn of the wheel those for whom life is a bet a winning or a losing. For them the future beckons with fortunes to be won by a turn of the cards. Some gamble with money, some with health, others with character, and a few even 60 THE EASE THAT DESTROYS 61 with their faith in a hereafter. For all of these life must constantly be impending tragedy. Probably in our own household, certainly in a nearby one, or in the office, we meet the Stewer no idle drifter he, no slipping down with the cur- rent, inert and nearly submerged. There is froth and foam where he is, for he keeps his world, whether it be large or small, in a turmoil. The toast is scorched, and he stews ; the car to the office is crowded, and he registers his condemnatory pro- test; the morning's mail is late, and the govern- ment is condemned. And all thru the day he lives in the midst of the acrid fumes of his own fussings. Or it may be the housewife who lives tense thru the years, forcing up her blood pres- sure, shortening her days, becoming sour in thought and speech, and acidulating the lives about her. The Gamblers and the Stewers stand for inord- inate, unnatural, life-shortening tension. One group sits on the volcano's lips, defying Fate; the other loses the calm and sweetness of living curdling the milk of life's pleasure and kindness by the damaging ferment of their own moods. But we also know that better group the Build- ers. They are sprinkled thru every community, or the communities would cease to exist. Determ- ination to accomplish, to earn, to produce, to serve his generation, distinguishes the Builder from the Drifter. Capacity to deserve, to return value re- ceived, to bide in patience from seedtime to harv- est, removes him from the Gambler. To have found satisfaction in the mere doing, whether the 62 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY task be dignified or menial, if duty has called, to add some element of interest or kindliness of un- derstanding to every transaction, whether the pur- chase of a paper from a newsboy, the dedication of a memorial chapel, or the dismissal of an unfaith- ful servant ; to labor contentedly accomplishing the small plan until the larger vista opens, confidently recognizing the supremacy of worth to so live raises the Builder undeniably above those who stew and grovel. It is taken for granted that the readers of this chapter are of the Builders ; that they are sincere, intelligent men and women, facing the problems of life as squarely as they know, and wanting help that none of their talents, few or many, may re- main buried. Balancing Work and Rest In principle and practice we have discussed the balancing of food and work, but only less important is the balancing of work and rest. Rare, truly, is the abnormal person who does not know the appeal of ease. It should be so. It represents a beneficent economy, and we are so constituted that ease may rank among the highest of pleasures. To those who have toiled, using mind and body earnestly, ardu- ously, consistently, till strength seems spent and weariness possesses to such, with souls at peace, hours of earned relaxation rank with the highest joys. Unlearned in life are they who have not tasted again and again the exquisite pleasure which comes when, spent with intensive effort, the soul-master commands, "stop and rest!" Such rest is conservative, constructive one of life's THE EASE THAT DESTROYS 63 perfect economies, the magician's secret. But it must be body-earned and heart-earned. For the masses, work-years bring no such heights of pleasure. They may tire their bodies into dead weariness, but protesting minds and envious souls embitter the sweetness of repose. With all hon- esty of purpose, the mental worker may toil till the sun is far set, but food-toxins extract restful- ness from his rest. Do we wonder that classes and masses have decided that heaven only is the place of perfect rest? And so religion after re- ligion promises their saved, as chief among Heaven's glories, an eternity of repose. The singing of paeans and the tuning of harps, accord- ing to some teachers, represent the acme of effort during a Christian's eternity; while, with fighting over, the Saracen warrior, dying on the field of battle, basks thru an eternity coddled in the lap of desire. The Ease That Saves There is a deep, inher- ently deep, reason for the appeal of ease, and this is found when we recognize and comprehend the ease that saves. There must be relaxation that there may be recuperation, and this is found in the ease of rest. Many of those who are failing to meet the problems of daily adjustment are losing out simply because they do not know how to rest. And pity it is that when the strenuous days come they may not be made glorious by renewing nights. On other pages we shall discuss in detail the prin- ciples of learning to rest. But for those who know how to snatch a few minutes of absolute re- laxation between tasks, who can lean back in their 64 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY chairs and closing their eyes shut out the sounds of busy people, and drawing the curtains of the mind sleep for twenty minutes, taking the siesta which invigorates and tones the whole man; for those to whom the caress of the pillow is the never failing hypnotic bringing seven and one-half hours of unalloyed restoration for such, the ease of rest robs the strenuous life of many dangers. There is a saving ease of plenty. Doubtless many physically defective, who live with injured lungs or hearts or inadequate eliminative organs, may prolong their years thru the immunities which their dollars can purchase. But as we have seen, such living does not lengthen maturity. It but ex- tends age. There is a constructive ease of plenty which allows the man of talent opportunity to de- velop his literary taste, to exploit his inventive genius, to devote a life-time to the mitigation of illness and the sufferings of poverty, to utilize to the highest his individual capacity as a Builder. Accomplishment, the very fact of having suc- cessfully done, gives to him who has succeeded be his success little or big, a modicum of ease. A task is never so hard the second time. It can be done with that minimum of effort, which stands for large economy, the fiftieth time. Each pleased customer increases the salesman's ability to please other customers. Every sermon seriously pre- pared and fervently rendered, has cleared the way, to the sincere minister, for richer fervour and bet- ter sermons. The young surgeon's first operation is done at a prodigious expenditure of nervous force. A hundred possible complications threaten THE EASE THAT DESTROYS 65 each step, complications which never materialize. Ease of mind and dexterity of movement soon come, till at last, he follows his art with the ease of mastery. But the most manifest of all ease is that inher- ent in strength. The example may be trite of the brutality of putting a fifty-pound knapsack on an invalid's back and commanding that he take it to the top of the hill. He does it at the risk of a fatal hemorrhage, or compromises forever his chances for recovery. That mile of struggle will stand out in his memory as a tragedy of torture. For the six-foot "dough-boy," who has so long carried his accouterments that he has forgotten their weight, the same mile of climbing would slip from memory with the passing of a pretty girl, or the swallowing of a good "mess." Does this illustration not bring clearly home to each of us the sanest, cheapest price to pay for ease? Mul- titudes fail because they assume the load, not having the strength nor the physical development offered by efficient, enduring muscles. They need organs and vessels toughened, too, as capable of standing strain as the dough-boy of carrying his pack. With such physical equipment, the multi- tudes of those who fall by the way would be decim- ated. And we must not forget that the soul needs its ease, without which prodigious mental capacity or the athlete's strength fails thruout the span of existence to provide lasting power. In some- thing better than ourselves we must have an abid- ing faith, if the spirit is to rest secure. 66 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY The Ease That Destroys Have we not been considering the tonic use of ease in each instance so far discussed, the ease which adds something to strengthen life in its purposes or accomplish- ments I But there is a reverse side really the subject of our chapter in which ease enters life as does a narcotic drug, to dull and deaden, to stultify, to lessen our contribution to passing days, the ease that destroys. Plenty may save, as it frequently does, the one who wins it. But more often it destroys those who obtain it without ef- fort. Plenty brings the ease that damns the char- acters of those who live contented, parasitic ab- sorbers of the efforts of others. Deep unhappi- ness hovers over many homes of wealth in which sons and daughters and often wives, too, seek the case of indolence. It is a deep-seated law of our being that there is no such ease that the one most certain road to* the disease of discontent, envy, selfishness, suspicion and disbelief is the life of indolence. To seek ease thru systematic avoid- ance of effort, duty and service is to take a down- ward path, one which shrivels soul, narrows mind and disorders even the bodies of the naturally strong. Plenty may be happiness-laden it may sow the pestilence. The lazy are confessedly persistent seekers after ease. With some the infirmity of laziness affects the body, others are mentally indolent. Most of us find ourselves peculiarly indifferent to certain tasks, even while we hold a reputation for industry. Son fairly devours history, but barely makes his grades in English. Daughter will practice two THE EASE THAT DESTROYS 67 hours a day without need of suggestion, while her mending accumulates till Mother is in despair. But Mother, too, has the fault. She administers her household with irreproachable zest but her correspondence! " Whenever will she answer?" complain all her friends. Father, yes, successful father, is the worst of all. He is a minute-man for business punctuality no lapses here still doc- tor, friends, wife and an annoying digestion fail week after week to get him out on the links. He won't take systematic exercise for the powers that be, or even to ward off the destruction that is creeping upon him. No more insidious influence enters to honey- comb character than our surrender of more and more activities to the ease of idleness. The writer recalls an impressive illustration in connection with the preparation of a camping site. It was on a mountain side one of the unequalled South- ern Appalachian heights. Forty medium sized hickories, as straight as rays of light, with un- blemished barks and cream-white trunks, were felled to build a cabin. The work was interrupted. A year later it was found, even on this dry moun- tain-side, that not one of these timbers, so perfect a year ago, was fit for building-use. It had taken thirty years for each to grow, and with continued activity, beauty and strength and utility would have continued to develop for another thirty years, but twelve months of uselessness robbed them of their virtues. Finally, there is the Coward's ease, and a pitiful lot they are who, surrendering to fear of pain, 68 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY count the multiplication of suffering ; who, to avoid a constructive present risk, retreat into the clutches of more certain destructive dangers. Multitudes avoid the dentist because they dread pain, the pain of his saving manipulations; and teeth which by early treatment could have been kept living and useful and beautiful many years, decay and ache, and the pain is assuaged with oil of cloves; and other teeth go the same way; then an infected mouth and offensive breath are fol- lowed by diseased gums and the absorption of health-damaging poisons. For our enlightened day, fear alone can explain such neglect. Medical men are ascribing a group of life-shortening sys- temic diseases to the foul poisons which an infected mouth contributes to the whole body. Time and again the family physician advises the removal of diseased tonsils and adenoids from the throats of children, but many mothers "can't stand the thought of an operation," and poorly shapen faces, imperfectly developed chests, defective resistance to tuberculous infection, unmusical voices and years of fetid breaths and worse are the herit- age such cowardly mothers force upon their help- less ones. There were three in the Williams family an honest, hard-working father, a nervous, hard- working mother, and Minnie, a good girl, their only child. When she was seven, her parents took her to the doctor's office because of her mouth- breathing and "sore throat." They were ear- nestly advised to have her tonsils removed. The father consented at once, but the mother later sent THE EASE THAT DESTROYS 69 word for the doctors not to come, as she couldn't ' ' stand it. ' * "When Minnie was eight she was quite ill for six weeks with inflammatory rheumatism. Then for five years she was reasonably well, tho' never robust. Then came diphtheria antitoxin most excellent care. The doctor was grave from the first examination, for he found the child's heart organically injured a result of the rheum- atism, and this a result, as we know to-day, of in- fection absorbed from her diseased tonsils. Min- nie seemed to be doing quite well the morning of the fifth day. She rose on her elbow and started to drink some water. She swallowed once, and crumpled down to half breathe once or twice, and shudder, and go a beautiful promise of girlhood destroyed by a coward's demand for ease. The most common ease, the ease which fairly coaxes old age, is that which permits mature men and women to live year after year deprived of the daily physical exercise without which the tissues remain oxygen-hungry and toxin-soaked. The half-hour a day spent in genuine, intensive, stren- uous muscle-work changes the slow moving blood and lymph currents into surging, renovating streams. Water in the fountain-basin, forced up- ward into the pure air and sunlight sparkles, many-hued, in its freshness. It leaps as tho' in gladness to purify and repurify itself. The same water transferred to a swampy pool soon becomes scum-covered, an infested, infected breeding place for slimy, repulsive life. Damaging ease of mind steals early into the lives of many after school days. And hosts of us 70 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY allow our superb mentality, so magnificently cap- able of reaching deeper and higher, of adding un- derstanding to understanding, and judgment to judgment, to remain shallow, to become less re- liable, until it is but a mockery of what it might have been. And this dwarfing is the price we pay for neglecting daily to give memory, ideation, rea- son the serious, strenuous half-hour which is the least price at which a growing mind can be pur- chased. Wilting, sluggish bodies, pretending, inaccurate, deficient minds, would be obviously less common if we but let Duty speak thru our souls, if we possessed the moral backbone to daily do those difficult half-hours which ease decries but for which an enlightened conscience pleads. Our sense of duty, our dictates of right, our obligations to principle, may be most disquieting, as reiterated by the still, small voice the voice we all have to obey or, if we would avoid wretchedness of spirit, to silence. One man sand-bags his conscience he hits it with a pint of whiskey or with reckless dare-devil associates, or a hectic, fervid, unnatural life. Others hypnotize their consciences by fair promises, by the putting off till to-morrow the "too busy to-day" kind, or persuade their con- sciences that they have found a better way, or let the arguments or ridicule of friends or the ex- ample of others lull them into a false security. Rarely, the conscience is murdered outright. Sometimes intelligent men and women deliberately barter their souls, and for those who believe in a THE EASE THAT DESTROYS 71 spiritual hereafter, the ease that destroys is most certain for them who, in cold blood, with calculat- ing forethought, attempt to destroy the spirit within. CHAPTER VII BLENDING WORK AND PLAY The Dignity of Work The worrier, complainer and cynic are one in discounting life, though worry, complaints and cynicism but add to human burdens. We have not been given a perfect abid- ing place, but a world to better thru human ef- fort. We are supposed to be co-workers with the Master Builder. Where there is incompleteness we may add, where tardiness we may hasten, where damage prevails we may remedy. Man's call to work, the highest expression of his earthly activ- ity, is so clear that the spiritually deaf alone fail to hear. If man's earthly business is to grow a soul he is forced to enrich the days by doing. He was made for work. How marvelously fashioned his creative, ambitious mind in its bewilderingly complicated, yet essentially adaptable body. How perfectly the two are combined, to the end that man's world can be put in order ! In the soil man must start. Thru ages of drudg- ing labor many accomplishments are to be wrought. The mass of human work has been, and still is, physical toil. And we all need toil of hands ; thru it alone comes the self-discipline which makes for generous power ; in it is born an under- standing of the masses of humanity whose produc- 72 BLENDING WOEK AND PLAY 73 tive force is muscular, not mental. Into the soil of common labor should every pair of hands delve for only so may brains and labor touch and mutual sympathy and respect be found. But starting in the soil, labor may mount till it reaches the heavens of creative power. It would seem that thru the unnumbered lives of large character products of years of honest toil the sacredness of work would impress even the thoughtless, and that the crime of shielding children from the least touch of drudgery would be impossible to even parents of superficial na- tures. But the shallow snobbery of wealth often binds the hands of its youth so tightly, thru form- ative years, that like paralytics they live on, not doing, not knowing, to breed others of their kind. The burden of the world's work faces us all. Each generation finds new tasks, as minds and hearts develop. Reefs and shoals threaten and impede navigation. For centuries harbors will be deepened and dangerous coasts made safe, for even the immensity of the sea is not enough. Country roads, a million miles of them, are made and un- made, and will remain but temporary until toil converts them into Appian Ways which can defy the centuries. And city streets are laid and dug up and widened and extended, cleaned and re- cleaned, yet too many of them remain rough and unsanitary. Remodeling, renovating and repair- ing are necessary even in palaces of art, while who can estimate the effort requisite to clean the world's dirty kitchens. Crops are to be sown and sown again, clothing to be made, remodeled, re- 74 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY placed, and mending and meals and darning and housecleaning and dishwashing will they ever cease? Much of the work of man consists in carrying himself and the products of his labor hither and thither. He is everlastingly going somewhere, or carrying or sending his belongings about, and his trucks and trains, sails and steamers are ever restless. Then, sermons must be written, weekly and editorials, daily, and ten thousand records a minute must be kept, or he forgets. Na- ture 's resources in air and sea and soil, deeply hidden, ceaselessly beckon to increasing effort that man may turn them to his use, even as do the forces of nature threaten and tantalize, till thru the ages strenuously the workers have wrought to harness them for human protection, as well as utilization. Is not the burden of the world's work, as we to-day sense it, enough to utilize the strength of the living and of countless generations yet to be f The Curse of Work Work is sacred. Its bur- den appeals to every right-minded man and woman. Still, in it, we find a curse. Perf ector of happiness, it too has fed the heart of wretchedness. We have seen how abundantly God has provided it for all. But since the serpent started folks to dallying, some have done no work; shifting the burden to others, they have created the vast classes of the slavishly overworked. In the injus- tice of the division of labor is found the curse of work. And the arrogance of idleness has never failed to ultimately develop resentfulness in the subsidized laborer, until to-day labor has found BLENDING WOBK AND PLAY 75 strength by combining its forces, and in finding strength is finding arrogance, too and resentful- ness and arrogance created the commune. And who shall say that there is not a righteousness in arrogance and resentment and communism so long as there remain a favored few too proud or too lazy to share humanity's burdens? Even a greater curse defeats the individual worker when his attitude toward his task becomes unsavory. Lacking devotion, he learns his work poorly, and a poor workman is dissatisfied and unsatisfactory, and inevitably creates an atmos- phere which poisons wholesome relationships. Unmethodical and disorderly workers by the thou- sands are able to-day, thru protection of organiza- tions formerly admitting only capable, conscien- tious artisans, to exact unearned and excessive wages nor can dishonesty beget honesty ! Again, the many add viciousness to their daily toil thru doing the disagreeable disagreeably. Most of us fail to brighten with the high lights of cheer the unpleasant task which may, for the time, be our lot, forgetting that a background of idealism makes a beautiful setting into which melt and harmonize the grime of the forge, the dust of traffic and the smoke of factories. Toil of body or of brain lacking in idealism saps youth betimes and brings on that senility which makes its old age sordid. When Play is Idealism What do we mean by idealism? More than can be told. But, in part, and a saving part we think idealism is play. Play life is always "make-believe" life, and we 76 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY always " make-believe" the things which we want and haven't. Little girls haven't babies, so they play with dolls. Their mothers "shoo" them out of the kitchen, so their custard pies are made with mud. Little boys are kept out of danger, so they "make-believe" Indian fights and stage "Wild West Shows" in the barn, converting poor puss into a ravening lion and puny younger brothers into cowboys bold. Their elders rarely stake their homes and fortunes and wives in games of chance, as did the sports of antiquity, but sit hour after hour developing lesser thrills thru the imaginary winnings of fortunate evenings in whist. Instead of gladiatorial combats in which primitive pas- sions were sated by the copious spilling of human blood, the virile thousands to-day sit with bated breath, or rend the welkin with their frenzied "rootings," as warriors on diamond and gridiron crash and win and lose. Play is idealism the idealism which every son of Adam and daughter of Eve has needed. The Profit of Play As heaven-crying injustice has grown out of the division of work, even so, in the division of play. Some overplay, others never play. As play itself can never be a true end of existence, he that overplays is shirking work, while he that underplays is a slave to his work. The reader, methinks, needs play. Otherwise he wouldn't be thinking of growing old. He prob- ably is one of that serious majority who believes he is " breaking down from overwork," while in bald truth he is aging because the spirit of play has gone from him. Body, mind and soul are re- BLENDING WORK AND PLAY 77 freshed and kept young by the play that stim- ulates and does not sate. Physical health and stamina increase the productiveness of all work- ers. They can add something to the delicacy of the painter 's brush or the deftness of the seam- stress's needle, to the cleverness of the architect's pencil and to the certainty of philosophic reason- ing. It is one of the misfortunes of work that comparatively few occupations develop the body and keep it young, strong and flexible. So we need a daily hour given to the play which keeps joint and sinew, heart, bone and muscle, young the play which holds sensitiveness to jars and jolts, to the temperature changes of the fickle weather, to the minor discomforts normal to daily life reservedly in the background. How few at sixty, how many at forty, would risk their precious bones sliding head first, or even feet first down a flight of steps'? So far from this tough- ness is Mr. Average-man at forty that if he slips on an icy walk he is out of the office with a wrenched back for several days. The same fall for his father at sixty, and a broken hip will prob- ably incapacitate him for months. Yet, father and grandfather laugh without restraint as Johnny, learning to skate, goes down resoundingly time and again. Johnny is young. The other two are old ! But a few minutes' eager, effortful daily ex- ercise continued thru the years would have kept grandfather as independent as Johnny. We for- get that bones, even as muscles, weaken thru dis- use, and that brittle bones at sixty are as untimely as shrunken muscles. To-day, past seventy-five, a 78 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY physical trainer of national note, leading his class of men, disdainfully pushes young and middle-aged till they are panting and frazzled, he alone remain- ing fresh, for he has not been out of training since his youth. Power of endurance which may be developed thru play goes hand in hand with the strengthen- ing of will which is one of the rich rewards of persistent bodily effort. And both muscles and mind can, in a large sense, be made obedient to the dictates of the masterful will. There is, too, the spiritual need for play. The strength and reserve which well up from every part of the body of a muscularly fit man saturate the indwelling soul with the peace of confidence. They are elements of spiritual hygiene of supreme significance. Again, let us grown-ups remember that the unexpressed does not long survive. Every day that we deny the appeal of the spirit of play, we are turning from a stimulating presence which, when we know in its fulness, is able to brighten each hour, to make more perfect each task, even to wipe out the curse of work. Children play with their minds and bodies. They perfect the art. Long before mid-life most of us have ceased any physical play-habits. Such playing as we do is usually of the mind. Chess and whist, for the mentally trained ; checkers and dominoes, euchre and flinch for the run of folks; gossip and fault-finding for most of the rest. Some play with explosives. The ' * insane Fourth ' ' maimed and killed for a century and a quarter. Gambling is often like the gun that ''wasn't BLENDING WOKK AND PLAY 79 loaded" It destroys the innocent. Impulse for gratification, desire to get away from the tedium of work, untaught or unthinking abandon make possible the reckless hour which may blight a life- time. Others, more deliberately plan, and make of life that sacred, beautiful gift a mere play- thing, and they, too, find the curse, even as do the slaves of toil. Life, while far from being a play- thing, is a game which the true sport plays to the finish. Winning or losing in strength, victimized by disease, succeeding in business or failing, gamely he plays it on. The true sport will never show the traits of the quitter ; he finds a richness in life that answers every appeal of his spirit. For him life is a perfect drama. Why do so many fail to hold this great truth of highest living close? Getting into Condition Some have never fitted themselves for play. Others have long since ceased to be fit. The first principle necessary for all who would add youth to years, is to get into physical condition. For the soggy and the soft, and that is most of them, getting fit means some months of gradually increasing, intensive, special training. For many, expert advice is needed. Some physicians are qualified to give this, tho' many, unfortunately, have visioned only the med- icinal equation in their far-reaching art. The Y. M. C. A. and Y. W. C. A. are training physical directors as experts in giving safe advice to the average man or woman seriously planning to go into training for health. Most magazines carry advertisements of "wonderful systems" of home gymnastics. But whoever the adviser, the indi- 80 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY vidual must be prepared for days of wretchedly sore muscles, for hours of fatigue which, to unac- customed nerves, will seem like the warnings of im- pending illness for the only exercise that counts is that which temporarily brings sore muscles and almost incapacitating lassitude. Most any man or woman not seriously damaged organically, who eats right and works right, can get himself as hard as nails by two hours spent in a good gymnasium daily for six months ; or in four months by devot- ing five hours a day to genuine muscular work on a farm. Six weeks of true "roughing it" on sea- shore, in mountain or woodland, averaging ten miles a day of active tramping, cooking, eating and sleeping out-of-doors, with an hour devoted to calisthenics, gradually becoming intensive even though limited to the simple exercises below de- scribed will turn the trick. It makes little differ- ence how we get ourselves to the point where fatigue is not exhaustion, when we can force every muscle of our bodies to its capacity again and again and not tear it down but build it up. When we can pant like the hound, hot on the trail, and feel our hearts going at triple speed like the run- ners of the Derby, when we can put surrender to bone-aching weariness, the fear of mere physical pain and the more common fear of wrecked dia- phragms and damaged hearts into the scrapheap of our cast-off weaknesses then we are fit! From now on keeping fit is a matter of one hour a day and moral backbone ! How to Keep Fit The following program is simple, essentially practical, and has proven last- BLENDING WORK AND PLAY 81 ingly effective in the lives of men and women of various ages and degrees of natural vigor. Let the day start with its greatest physical victory be- fore the appointed hour has ceased striking. The blandishments of pillows and sheets are foresworn. The bath mat and bathrobe are adequate acces- sories and uniform for the fifteen minutes of most strenuous effort the day is to know. And so started, what terrors have the days, when you are confident that there will be no challenge to your strength from an outside source which will equal the demands you have voluntarily laid upon your- self ; that the kitchen and the store and the count- ing-room, the hours with the sick, have no in- tensities equal to that which you have already de- manded of yourself, that you are your own task- master not Life? Thus is the freedom of strength willed and earned! The tooth-brushing might come first. It is next in refreshment to the bath. Then, within range of an open window, you take the soldier's position of "attention." Not "head up and shoulders back," as we used to be taught, but with chin well retracted (drawn back and in), neck, chest and shoulders will fall into right lines now you lay the whip to the sources of vitality. One hundred toe-extensions, (Illus- tration No. 1) honest ones, clear up, the last thirty so rapidly that, no matter how many years you have done them, you feel a stab in the calf muscles. And with the last fifty, circumduct the elbows vig- orously, (Illustration No. 2) one circle with each extension. Then put in five or ten, or if you are unusually strong, fifteen "pull-ups" or "chins," 82 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY ILLUSTRATION I Fig. 1 Fig. 2 The position of attention Toe extensions. Hands may be raised each time as in Fig. 2 or the exercise taken with hands on hips and arms akimbo. as the boys say, (Illustration No. 3) on the little home-made bar you have rigged up in your room. Some women can "pull- up," too, and it is a splendid exercise for them. But many women and some men must de- velop their arm muscles by prac- tising for the early weeks on a low bar, placed so they can pull themselves up from, first a seated, then from a crouching, position thus allowing the leg muscles to help the arms till they ILLUSTRATION II Toe extension with circumduction of arms. BLENDING WORK AND PLAY 83 ILLUSTRATION III Fig. 1 Fig. 2 The " pull up " or " chinning." Backs of hands may be turned forward if the exercise is easier become strong. Simply hanging from the bar by the hands, and trying to "chin" uses chest, shoul- der and back muscles actively. And no one should be satisfied until he can hang from the bar and slowly elevate his feet to right angles with the body, with the legs stiff and straight, (Illus- tration No. 4). This wrings weakness out of the abdominal muscles. You will be panting now, so ease up with ten body-flexions, which means throw- ing yourself forward, knees straight, till your fin- gers touch the floor ten times, with "pep," (Illus- tration No. 5). Some deep-breathing you are do- ing by now, the lung-proofing kind. Then the ex- 84 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY ILLUSTRATION IV Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 The "pull up" with legs at right angles, to strengthen abdominal muscles ercise for the back and pushing muscles. You will soon learn at what distance from the wall to stand, ILLUSTRATION V Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Body flexions. Keep knees straight! BLENDING WORK AND PLAY 85 far enough always to bring forth a real strain of effort to regain the perpendicular as you fall for- ward, and with back and arm muscles force your- self upright. (Illustration No. 6.) Ten times ILLUSTRATION VI Fig. 1 First position for " push out " from wall this, the last four, inching farther away until it takes all your strength and a grunt to make it. And now, if you are a man and shave yourself, it 's a good time to get your wind. But what shall a woman do? Make use of a "breathing spell" to "do up" her hair at all events, be ready for the master single exercise of them all the "spread- eagle." This requires practice. It may take you months to get it "in form" if you have neglected active muscular use for years and the hinges are rusty. Chin back, erect posture, up on your toes, 86 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY ILLUSTRATION VI Fig. 2 Second position " push out ILLUSTRATION VI Fig. 3 Third position on return from " push out BLENDING WOKK AND PLAY 87 sink down until you are squatting on your heels, if able, keeping the body erect. As you go down allow the arms, extended, to rise above the head. (Illustration No. 7.) Return to standing position, and as you come up lower the stiffly straightened ILLUSTRATION VII Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Position of Part way down Entirely down, attention, up then return to at- on toes. tention. The Spread Eagle. arms behind the hips. When you are soft ten times is enough too much for your comfort the following day. Fifty times, yes, sixty, often sev- enty, and occasionally, eighty without stopping, is the capacity for men and women in condition. Most athletes are satisfied with one hundred. Now, your thighs are throbbing. They may feel numb. You are gasping, as you should. You are almost faint, and things look misty. And this is well when you are fit. Now for the tub, cold or cool, at whatever temperature you have developed 88 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY the ability to react from promptly ; and with heart pumping one-hundred-and-forty times a minute, such a heart as you now have, your power of re- action, which means only the re-establishing of skin circulation, is a certain thing. Then on the bath-mat, as you vigorously rub dry and a linen Turkish towel is best time is saved and reaction ILLUSTRATION VIII Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 The Spread Eagle with spring into air from squatting position assured by combining toe-extensions, another one- hundred, with the drying process. Now, warm and glowing the triumphant finishing touch ten spread-eagles with a spring fast as you can, go down and leap up. (Illustration No. 8.) In- stead of this last most strenuous effort, one-hun- dred strides, counting the left foot only, of station- ary running, may be vigorously done. Chin back and standing in one place, go thru the motions of running, lifting the knees high and treading only on the balls of the feet. This is another most ex- BLENDING WORK AND PLAY 89 cellent single exercise for legs, breathing appar- atus and heart. (Illustration No. 9.) ILLUSTRATION IX Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Stationary running This program stands for intensive work. It is intended to be strenuous. It is opposed to many systems of physical culture. It has four decided advantages. It is economical in time, it develops will and muscle, it promotes reserve and holds fast to health. The one-hundred toe-extensions and fifty spread-eagles must, of course, be arrived at gradually. This is supposed to have been done in getting fit. After undressing at bed-time, the morning pro- gram should be repeated, omitting part of the toe- extensions, the spread-eagles with a spring and the stationary running. Ten minutes' work be- fore bed-time will be plenty if the fifteen minute morning-program has been done. In addition, the 90 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY thirty minutes out-of-doors, with a four-pound medicine-ball for women, or a six-pound one for men, will round out a physically righteous day. And, with the medicine-ball, missionary work is possible. The wife, the cook, the neighbor's boy, the neighbor himself, will often take with you that health-bearing half-hour the only real muscle- training and vitality-restoring activity which their daily life will know. Eating sanely, exercising thus strenuously, reserving two weeks in the year for a genuine "roughing-it" outing and the road to physical health is wide open. One year of such life means strength, ten years health, thirty years the vital reserve which marks the rare man or woman. Some are so situated that they may spend a vigorous, refreshing half-hour in the water and this is good. Six sets of live tennis a week, dis- tributed between two or three matches, is a most superior, vigor-increasing sport. It is unfortun- ately practical the year round for all too few. Golf is growing in popularity, and with many wholesome reasons. If taken in addition to sys- tematic strenuous morning and evening exercise, it leaves little to be desired as an out-of-door ac- tivity. But too many are making the fatal mis- take of depending upon golf alone to keep them young, believing that nine or eighteen holes once or twice a week stand for adequate, constructive, physical effort. It takes more than golf to make and keep one fit. The gymnasium has been mentioned. Under a live instructor three one hour classes weekly, in- BLENDING WORK AND PLAY 91 eluding some hand-ball or "squash " with rigorous adherence to the room-exercises so insistently recommended will solve the " keeping muscles fit" problem for many. Blending Work and Play It is a question whether the human being exists who can, year after year, thus order his life into orderliness with- out consciously or unconsciously attaining the magnificent ability to blend work and play. His capacity for enjoyment this wholesome, healthy man becomes ten-fold that of his defectively liv- ing neighbor. He has put seriousness into his play-life and joy into his work-life. He has held before him the ideal of personal efficiency. With health and vital reserve, he has steadily grown more efficient, and efficiency makes play of work. Lover-like, he has intensively wooed Hygeia, the goddess; he has made his workshop a trysting- place with Inspiration. Voltaire, the brilliant, the imaginative, finely and discerningly said: "Work can take the place of all the illusions we lose." In truth, are not the satisfactions which devotion to the chosen task brings, more perfect realities, more genuine pleasures, than tantalizing dreams the fancies of youth 1 So, shall we not leave off worrying and go on working for emanating from our work-play days will ever come a moral influence inseparable from the conviction of the sacredness of our task. And all work, in ditch or in presidential chair, is sacred, when we labor not as menial servitors, or as arrogant masters, but as fellow-workers. CHAPTER Vin RENEWING ONE'S YOUTH Ethan Allen Davis was born in 1855 on the Davis Farm, between Sugargrove and Lottsville, just off the Penn-York State line a hilly fifty acres and stony, thin of soil a poor man's farm. Ethan was one of eight children, five of whom bore the names of American Revolutionary generals, while the three girls revealed by their Biblical naming the religiousness of the Davis family. Eight children in the little five-room, unpainted, weather-beaten house built back from the road on the beweeded, clayey hillside near the spring be- low the barn below the barn! So Rebeccah, Israel Putnam and Horatio Gates were one after another carried up beyond the orchard pathetic little funerals they were to be buried, each hav- ing died of the ' 'fever.' ' But Ethan Allen thrived on the work from sun-up to dark, on the monotonous diet, the ex- posure and long cold winters, the blistering sum- mers, with little play. Faithfully, till he was twenty-one, he stayed at home. Somehow, the farm had grown to nearly one-hundred acres the Davises now owned some of the old Mears* bottom- land and when Ethan was of age and asked to go to the great Centennial Exposition at Phila- delphia and to try for a job in the city, his father 92 RENEWING ONE'S YOUTH 93 gave him $150.00 and, almost tenderly, hoped him "good luck." And "good luck" it was to be, most of us would say. Ethan Allen Davis was a sturdy, sterling young fellow, six feet one, one-hundred-ninety- pounds, every ounce of which was vital tissue ; sim- ple, direct, gentle, clear-thinking he could only be charged with being "too honest," tho' he was never taken advantage of the second time save by his wife, who thru the years flayed her considerate husband mercilessly, utilizing to the limit the rights conferred on her by matrimony to demand and exact comforts, luxuries, immunities, prefer- ences, indulgences and devotion without stint. But we are turning the pages too rapidly. Ethan spent five days and twelve of his guarded dollars in Philadelphia at the Exposition, then set out to find work. Trenton this year was celebrat- ing the bi-centennial of its first settlement, also the hundredth anniversary of Washington's bril- liant coup which captured one thousand Hessian invaders, with the loss of two Americans. In Ethan's simple home-life his father's stories of the War of Independence and its heroes had made Trenton a Mecca and a shrine. So, in perfect con- tent, he accepted a dollar a day to shovel and mix, in a Trenton pottery. Contented he always re- mained with whatever salary he received, tho ' am- bition wakened early and for long years never rested, ambition to understand his work and to find better methods of doing it. He was at once fascinated with the art in which he was now but a menial helper. His senses were ever alert, his 94 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY quiet queries became more and more pertinent. He bought some books ; he made friends with the older men ; he was advanced to the firing depart- ment ; he spent his spare time in the modeling and decorating rooms, and later saw a design of his own creating used on a "new shape" which the firm advertised as "rivalling the finest French china." Ethan was only twenty-seven when he was made foreman of the Decorating Department, with a salary of one thousand a year then came his misfortune. Hattie Evans's father owned a pottery, too. He was Welsh, and had wrought thru the years dil- igently for the moderate success which made it possible for his wife and Hattie to live in com- fortable idleness. The daughter, ever freshly dressed, plump, active, with snapping black eyes, milk-white teeth, and a pretty face which always beamed when Ethan was near, captivated the young designer, and he was hers to use or abuse from the first touch of hands. Hattie 's mother had plans, and objected. Hattie thought she was in love, and became obdurate. The father saw the man and the potter in Ethan Davis. It was three ayes to one nay so the ayes had it. The young man's joy ws unalloyed, till after the wedding. Within a year he realized his young wife was a woman without a vision. She lived only for the day and what its hours brought. Love for him, devotion to parents, the inspiration of patriotism, which had meant so much in his life, loyalty, ideals these were not hers ; nor was she ever to be blest by their uplift. All of this was RENEWING ONE'S YOUTH 95 not revealed to the young husband during any single hour of disillusionment, but within a twelve- month of married life he found himself facing the problem of living successfully a lifetime with a woman miserably empty of heart and soul, when compared with his own plain-faced, unlettered mother. But he faced this discrediting handicap manfully. He had realised his wife's deficiencies, as he now knew, too late. He never censured; censure could not have helped. He confided no syllable which might have secured him temporarily comforting sympathy, nor any syllable of crit- icism, for she could only have resented and replied in kind. His own estimate of his wife was never voiced, and he buried his disappointment and lone- liness and the sense of the emptiness in his home, deep in a grave which he felt would hold them fast buried them under his reverence for the ideal he had thought her to be, under patience and long- suffering gentleness, under a kindly understand- ing of what she was not, under a devotion which millions of faithful and worthy wives have never been given. What money would buy seemed her only conception of happiness so he made money. He gave up his designing save at odd times. His father-in-law was growing old, and rapidly turned over the business management of the small factory to the young man, who saw wisely and dreamed wisely and learned to work with tremendous energy. When Ethan was thirty the firm's name was changed to ''Evans and Davis" the name which has stood for so much that is honorable and artistic, advanced and sue- 96 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY cessful, in the field of American pottery. At forty Ethan constituted the firm. A score of active young men had been given an interest in the rap- idly growing concern, and Mrs. Davis had the use of all the money which her little heart craved. Even at thirty-six her charm had waned badly, with no promise that a beautifying spirit would soften the wrinkles which selfishness was deepening. When Mr. Davis was fifty he was more than a millionaire there were now two potteries an- nually turning out an immense product. For nearly twenty years his brains and fingers alone had worked. He had gained in weight and obvi- ously in girt. His vacations consisted of trips to France and England, where he studied the meth- ods of other great manufacturers of iron-stone and porcelain. Mrs. Davis always went with him and spent many American dollars for much European finery. Gradually, their style of living had be- come more and more elaborate, and they had reached the footman stage of social development when something went wrong in the back of Mr. Davis' head. He had learned no method of relax- ation; his pleasures were active participation in his work which had developed so remarkably, and a passive interest in his wiiVs bids for recognition in progressive strata of society. Protective work with his hands and rejuvenating play of mind or body he had not known. For a number of months he had found himself from time to time pressing the back of his head with his large and still strong hands. The spring he was fifty-one he realized that this discomfort was interfering with his clear- RENEWING ONE'S YOUTH 97 ness of thought, that short periods of concentra- tion intensified the sensation, and his good sense told him that he was not doing justice to the prob- lems which were brought to him. Complaint in the Davis home had been the wife 's prerogative a thousand new ones a year, probably, would cover her record enough, we all grant, for any family. Without mentioning his mission at home, he consulted a well-known Philadelphia neurologist, who peremptorily ordered rest, the kind rich folks can take six months' abroad, a summer in Can- ada, or a long fishing trip on the Great Lakes. He did not tell the doctor that the plans would have to include two, one of whom was inordinately fastidious and thoroughly incapable of tolerating Canadian forests or baiting a fish-hook, so he quietly told the wife that business would keep him traveling thru Europe for a number of months. So it was one foreign hotel after another, some- times one day, sometimes two weeks at a place the changes always being influenced by his wife's desires. Thru Norway and Sweden, gradually further south, thru Italy, even two weeks in Egypt, whence they fled to Paris for the comforts Mrs. Davis always enjoyed. She knew nothing of her husband's business details and hardly sensed his slowly oncoming illness. His " business engage- ments" consisted of long, lonely walks. One morning she suddenly realized in her husband's haggard face the disconcerting truth. In an al- most frenzy of panic, she sent for doctors, whose only answers to her demands for health were the German cures and the sleep-producing drugs. 98 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY The master hand had been out of touch with the multiplied interests of the factories, and an emerg- ency arose of unquestioned urgency which de- manded Mr. Davis' presence. Coming home seemed good medicine, and for several weeks he was better so much so that the wife quite lost sight of her alarm, in her own many petty troubles. The sleeping-powders had for the time brought a certain sense of betterment, but before long Mr. Davis recognized that his improvement was ficti- tious, that he was having to use more of the medi- cine which gave sleep without refreshment. He again quietly visited his Philadelphia physician he had not seen him since his return. It so hap- pened that the Doctor was away from the city for a fortnight ; his assistant, however, looked up the records and went into many details of the sick man's case which the older specialist had failed to touch. Unconsciously, in giving his responses, Mr. Davis had revealed some of his wife's limita- tions. At the end of the conference this earnest, keen-sighted young physician stated: "I believe, Mr. Davis, that you have long been denying your birthright. Till you were twenty-five you did very hard manual labor and still show evidences of having been a powerfully muscled man, but for nearly thirty years your only active muscular use has been driving to your office and the long, leisurely walks you took in Europe. With the magnificent start physically which you had, you should now be living at the very acme of health, strength and efficiency. But you already are aging, and prematurely you are loosening your 99 hold on active living. You have before you the choice of retiring and entering into an untimely old age of limited diet and endless concessions to the nervous exactions which will gradually in- crease, or of renewing your youth." The last phrase probably slipped from the young counsellor unconsciously, but it struck the deepest chord in Ethan Davis' nature which had been touched for many years, and the young doctor was startled, as he looked up, to see tears coursing down the older man's face a face so tense and changed by emo- tion that the young man realized the inefficiency of words, and he quietly busied himself some min- utes with the records. Finally, the question, "What do you mean?" And quickly the doctor thought, "Yes, what part of that youth he so loved can be restored?" For those days, in the treatment of the nervous, his response was inspired. "Have Mrs. Davis come to me. A summer in the White Mountains will help you both only she must stick it out. Let her have her suite in a hotel, and the car. You must put in eight hours a day on a farm, and will be too tired for hotel life except for week-ends. You must work and sweat and live on simple food till you have lost fifty of those sluggish pounds and revitalized the other hundred-and-eighty. It will be play for you after the first three weeks, and the sleep you knew four years ago will come again. With three months so spent each summer, you will be kept fit for your large labors and re- sponsibilities, and will stand even the artificial life of your luxurious home for a half generation." 100 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY Inspired the young doctor certainly was, and his words awakened into life, in his patient, thrill- ing recollections of rugged days of youth. It ap- pealed to his common sense at once, as it had to his imagination, and in an hour a constructive con- fidence was born. "Neither your wishes nor your wealth can save him, Mrs. Davis. Body or mind is going to go. It's been coming on for years, only he would not complain. We have been trying to save him other ways for many months, and have failed. Go to the mountains with him each summer and help him to do as we say, or you won 't have him long. ' ' And, as life without him seemed impossible, her fear and selfishness helped the doctor. Mr. Davis was nearly fifty-five when he grasped the hour hand of Time and slowly, desperately at first, forced it back. But it was even as the young doctor had visioned. Within the month his mus- cles began to bring him joy first, a grim joy of duty done, then an almost childish joy of simple accomplishment, finally a strong man's joy in using his strength the strength that returned until it reminded him of those virile days of his young huskiness, when he was a physical match for anyone in Warren County. The half generation has passed and the exi- gencies of the Great War have been met success- fully by Ethan Allen Davis, now two-times mill- ionaire, who still holds unfalteringly steady the large affairs of his great company. He has never ceased being the soul of consideration to his de- RENEWING ONE'S YOUTH 101 fective, unseeing wife, and it is on his own New Hampshire farm, thru the summer months, that he has from year to year renewed his youth and made his great strength of mind and soul possible. CHAPTER IX WHY THE MIND FAILS The Mansion of the Mind Who has not visioned a mansion of his own planning a Dutch Colonial, a Georgian, a quaint Elizabethan, a more stately Renaissance or an unique Oriental-Mission com- bination? Few are so devoid of love of domicile or individualism in taste as not to have pictured a fine home, the fulfilment of their dreams, among their aircastles, though but one out of the many will ever take form in stucco, brick or marble. Each of us is daily making some plan, developing some detail, beautifying some aspect of the man- sion of the mind that edifice, humble, defective of noble the unescapable product of our mental ac- tivities. Each hour we add something to its com- pleteness, or fail to put into place some stone or to polish some surface, which so neglected, re- mains a permanent defect. Peculiarly free are we all, these days of many advantages, from possible interruption of our plan, or defacement of our construction, by others. We build the mansion of our minds largely as we will. Others may be to blame for our defective foundation but not for an unattractive super- structure. Parents and friends and teachers do influence us all in the matter of principles. These may be made lastingly sound or dangerously de- 102 WHY THE MIND FAILS 103 fective, even in our quite early years, for the ones which abide unchanging may be placed before our teens. Few are free from the necessity, periodic- ally, of stopping construction, and of taking out defective material and replacing the worthless with the worthy. But whether laid early, or en- larged or relaid later, the completed mansion will rest upon our own foundation of principles. As the building progresses, we find ourselves seeking the market of the world for materials of our liking, materials which, like our foundations, will defy time. We seek each day for new facts to be used as beams and girders, flooring, framework and roofing, as we create room after room of that magnificent pile which is in the end to represent a life of sane, honest, constructive building. But bare indeed would be the result of the best of masonry and carpentry unfurnished and un- adorned. The wise man furnishes his kitchen first but we have already seen how common is the ignorance of dietetic truths. And this depart- ment of the outwardly fine mansion is too often crudely equipped or unkempt. How very few even think of gymnasium, or furnish it if built, or use one if furnished. Libraries are much more popular, and, undoubtedly, much more used, but as often are they planned to represent the decora- tive as the constructive aspect of our building. Let us not forget that the creative capacity of the normal mind is such that in threescore well-spent years our mansion may become palatial in outline, in solidarity of construction, in richness and re- finement of furnishings, a truly worthy edifice cap- 104 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY able of satisfying the earthly span of the noble soul the mansion's master. Who can for a mo- ment question the blessings of existence when he realizes the inexhaustible richness of material, the unending variety of possible plans for construc- tion, the soul's ability to create even in the midst of the busiest hours the adornments of culture and character. What town is without its " Smith's Folly," or "Jones's Fizzle"? And what monument of fail- ure and fizzle is more obvious than a deserted, half- completed building, with foundations hidden in un- checked weeds, and gaunt rafters, the unpainted sheeting and eyeless windows sheltering only spar- rows, mud-daubers and the "spooks" so certain to come. Yet, where one such dismal monument ad- vertises some unfortunate's financial failure, on a busy street a hundred men and women will pass each hour who have failed or are failing in the building of the mansion of their minds. Some few of these received hopelessly defective material from their parents ; more many more have thru ignorance, indifference or, unfortunately, even by deliberate choice, selected low-grade stone, mortar and timbers; or have constructed without far- seeing and clearly thought-out plans. Still others have neglected that which was given them to use. A few have destroyed the good that was put into their hands, have cast away even their tools. Such are the mentally diseased, the hereditary de- fectives, the careless, the reckless, the vicious, in the use of their gifts and opportunities. Among them will be seen now and then the rare unf ortun- WHY THE MIND FAILS 105 ate who has gone down to failure sinned against. For some of these there never was a chance. For others to-day is too late. Many can still tear down and build anew if helped by the strong who give of their strength and substance to serve those in need. The House in Disorder Numbers fail mentally, not thru lack of energy or ability, not thru lack of material of the best kind, but wholly because their work is not orderly. Not a small percentage of men and women who have been given unusual ad- vantages live on thru the years in the midst of ten- sion and unhappiness and practical failure because they do not think clearly because the element of confusion, like a tangled network, impedes their progress and limits their productiveness. This type of mind is increasing hand in hand with the growing complexity of life, and is specially in- fluenced by our augmenting educational require- ments. Truck after truck of building material may be unloaded on our building site, only to in- crease confusion and waste and litter, if not rightly utilized. The prodigious advance in a hundred departments of human knowledge has caused us to overestimate the value of mere facts, forgetting that education consists not in the accumulation of material, but in its related use. So schools and colleges are tempted to pile and cram facts into the minds of those they train, rather than to sys- tematically undertake the far more difficult task of training minds into the right use of principles. Only when the ability to reason and judicially select is developed, should the teacher introduce 106 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY the complex. Other training than this will too often make for understandings which fail to recog- nise valuation. Such mental equipment is waste- ful, as are they wasteful who, whether in kitchen or store or shop, in bank or pulpit, do not clearly know comparative worth. Here is the foundation of extravagance a most obvious form of modern wastefulness. It is appalling how many of the presumptively educated are incapable of discuss- ing most questions on their merits piteously lack- ing in the capacity to distinguish a principle from an opinion, a fact from a belief. For such minds as these, plans are almost meaningless save as a basis of change, alteration or further confusion. And tension is inevitable whenever progress is attempted, for they work in a confusion approaching frenzy. Women probably more than men suffer and cause to suffer, make mistakes, mis- understand, forget, act impulsively and misjudge because of habitual hazy thinking. Misdirected thought results in a house in disorder. And such a simile perfectly portrays the mental furnishings we find from basement to attic in many mansions which to the passer-by appear stately. How the Mind Fails Were we limited to a dis- cussion of a single aspect of "Why the Mind Fails," we should not concern ourselves with de- fective material or confusion in the use of mate- rial, but consider only the chief est of all reasons the lack of it. No edifice can ever take form with- out the products of quarry, forest, factory and forge. Even so the mansion of our mind is en- larged day by day, is perfected year by year, is WHY THE MIND FAILS 107 furnished and embellished thru the decades be- cause something new is constantly being added. The statement has been made that between twenty and forty many become satisfied with their supply of knowledge ; many have in their own belief com- pleted their plans they consider no future altera- tions ; many with self-satisfaction accept their own opinions as superior to their neighbor's, even tho' he is a man of special training. As we allow our minds to trace and retrace the same path, ruts are formed which make it increasingly difficult for us to change habits, to visit new fields, to consider thoughtfully new opinions, to be toler- ant, mentally active, to diversify. Then we are turned from eager, investigating, knowledge -crav- ing activities of youth into an unnoticing, uninter- ested, self-satisfied mental old age. The most common reason for this is indolence of mind. This is expressed in many forms, the most usual being our own belief that we are too tired to study, that our minds need amusing after a day of duties. Mental indolence is frequently cloaked by conceit. We "know enough." We have "made good" in the store or our profession. Our bank ac- count speaks eloquently of our ability. We are clever, and have "put it across" so often what 's the use of grinding ! Nobody in our own little bailiwick is as well posted as we. So "we should worry!" Conceit only, never real ambi- tion, would thus be satisfied. To take up a real study after one is forty : a natural science, French, a volume on household economics, applied psychol- ogy ; to plunge into the not-too-inviting complex!- 108 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY ties of physiology and personal hygiene; to seri- ously follow a course in cookery, millinery or dressmaking; to read one volume of standard fic- tion a month, to insist upon twenty minutes of Bible-study and a half-hour of history for your- self and your family each day does it seem a humiliating confession of inadequacy? Will not the very suggestion increase the tightness with which some will close their minds to any innovation standing for mental progress ? Almost fatal mental narrowness results from habitual failure to express thoughts in action. An unlettered couple starting with only the funda- mentals of education may acquire a large learning in twenty-five years of daily exchange of thought, if the material of the study hour is sincerely reviewed in a sympathetically critical spirit. Thought expressed grows; silenced it dies. We live in the age of humanity's most infinite riches. Our interests are hourly in the presence of the new and the stimulating. Experts in many de- partments daily add to the richness of our knowl- edge. If a mind remains inactive in the face of this wealth of appeal, it is but an old mind blind and deaf; unseeing, unhearing, it knows not the value of the new which passes by. The growing mind demands the new for its food as the grow- ing body requires protein for its development and denied this it cannot mature. One man fails in business; his friend's success is proverbial. A housewife keeps her home in effort-saving order; her cousin's life is one dis- turbance after another with servants, merchants WHY THE MIND FAILS 109 and children. The successful business man and the orderly housewife possess minds which have studied detail as related to adaptability ; the others fail because they are lacking in this superior ex- pression of successful living. Constructive adapt- ability always indicates breadth of mind, diversity of interest, the courage to face difficulties and the holding fast to a vision. Mental narrowness de- forms the mind as worry-wrinkles do the face ; it robs the mental eye of its luster, the mental grasp of its strength. And the vision must not be lost, for as it goes the palsy of dulling mental activity creeps in. As the vision of life's best fades, the far-off horizon begins to creep closer stealthily, imperceptibly at first ominously it narrows, deadeningly it contracts till at last we do not see beyond the small circle of our business interests or the limited confines of our home till for some wretched ones there is no interest left beyond selfish personality. Thus the mind fails. CHAPTER X KEEPING THE MIND YOUNG Narrowing Self-satisfaction Youth has the call over old age. Experience counts much in the seri- ous affairs of life. But it is a weakness of many "experienced" to be so satisfied with their ac- cumulated ability that they turn from the cheer and lilt, the keen interests, thrilling loves and grip- ping faith which make youth so dear. If we are to keep youth close we must hold fast to its good. We shall ever renew interest the zest of youth; grow in capacity for love the beauty of youth; and allow no disillusionments to rob us of faith, the stability of youth, which holds true the soul, even thru the mercurial emotional fluctuations of youthful days. As Mr. Man-of-Fifty muses upon his mental habits, he is very apt to discover that the accumu- lations of the past are receiving more of his attention than the plans and promises of the future. At fifty he is usually a success or a fail- ure in the eyes of the world, and probably in his own; and in either case is spending considerable time relating the details of how he did it, or how the other fellow did him. And the self-centered habit of thought now grows in the soil of the past, even as in earlier years it thrived when nourished by selfish sensitiveness. There is no sign more no KEEPING THE MIND YOUNG 111 undeniable that the mind is aging than its tendency to live in the past, to be satisfied with what it has accomplished, to chronically grieve and mourn for what has been lost. There is no mental tendency of youth, whether the youth of ten or seventy, more characteristic than its refusal to be bound by yesterday, its insistence on the promise of to- morrow. The majority of us dread old age, not so much on account of its physical infirmities, as from a belief that its days are tedious and tiresome, that one lives on, bored with existence, thru its rapidly emptying years. Tedious and tiresome indeed is much of senility, the senility which can repeat over and over non a propos experiences and successes long 1 since ancient history, respectfully listened to on the basis, only, of the homage due old age. Probably an even earlier evidence, certainly a re- lentless cause of mental aging, is the advent of dogmatism. In politics and business, in religion, in dress, in morning salutations or philosophic principles, wherever, whenever the unthinking mind rests fixed or the investigating mind becomes self-satisfiedly immovable, dogmatism has arrived. When one accepts the dogmatic attitude toward any subject, he accepts limitations. Thus again old age may anticipate the years and the young theologic student of twenty-three be hopelessly senile, so far as concerns any future broadening of his doctrinal views. Sadly for him, Paul's in- junction to the Thessalonians to "Prove all things, " has been lost sight of in the further ad- monition to "Hold fast to that which is good." 112 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY The Adaptability of Strength or Weakness How almost universally man forgets that there is nothing which is permanent but change. Change is the law of every expression of matter. It is the very basis of life, but the aging mind ignores this deep truth. And how much deeper can your understanding enter into the great secret of human existence than when it realizes that the changes which never cease, the changes which are as in- evitable as the onrushing of spheres in sidereal space ; that change, whether expressed in the un- dertaking of a new exercise, the choosing of a busi- ness associate, the acceptance of new ideas on character formation, in loss, gain, sickness or death each manifestation of change is but a challenge to individual adaptability. And adapt- ability is life. He who greatly lives adapts him- self fittingly to great and small. More of us com- plain that while we face the big things we cannot tolerate the little ones. Thereby we disclose our own littleness. The host of the discontented and restless are combatting, not adapting. Old age ignores and forgets, senses not nor sees. And when ignoring and forgetting and unsensing and unseeing days come, the leaves are falling, the tree is being bared, and growth stops and beauty flees then old age takes on the form of Death. Let us not feel too comfortable tho' we seem to be getting on famously with people and events and things. For there is an adaptability of weak- ness. Some natures passively conform, and in- ertly are adjusted by the forces of their surround- ings. So is the drifting log in the river's current, KEEPING THE MIND YOUNG 113 or the rotting log moldering in the forest. Vitally different is active adaptation which while harmon- izing with situations and surroundings creates. What personality so little that it cannot add a friendly handclasp, a restraining touch, a cheering word, a comforting glance, a gentle admonition to each human contact. What nature so sluggish that it cannot quicken interests by entering into even a chance companion's experiences? Sympa- thy, interest, saving facts, guiding wisdom, the richness of experience, the tenderness wrought into life by suffering who so barren as to have none of these to add some touch to momentarily cheer, to constructively create, to, once in a life- time, magnificently save? Nor has anyone lived an hour, it matters not the number of his years, the wealth which has been lavished upon him or which he has strewn broadcast, the "big business" he has done, the offices he has held, if he has not given of himself. For living does not come till one creates, till he has lifted some load and carried some burden; till he has brightened some life or strengthened some faith. Life is an increasing creation; old age, which is but premature Death, never enters while the creating touch remains. Progress is a never-pausing procession, which for ages refuses to retravel the same road. And for every human span the path of progress will remain unceasingly new. The journey of no day will be repeated by him who looks beyond the near-by dust and weed-choked fences. But there are always those who will look no further, and they complain of the monotony and of the endless 114 OLD AT FORTY OE YOUNG AT SIXTY grind. The soul unquestionably can see beyond. What is soul but mind divinely touched, mind made immortal ! And the intellect that would not un- timely die will daily attend to its own upbuilding. It will call no day done until in some book or life or personal experience, in some chastening defeat or sobering victory it has discovered something better. The days merge into years with the grime of the shop, the contracting routine of the kitchen, unre- lieved. The odor of the burning hoof never changes for the blacksmith ; the forty faces before the school-teacher remain, session after session, some bright and some dull. The clergyman's "Finally, Brethren," thru out the years must point a moral. And it all stands for deadly monotony, the herald of age. Renewing the Mind There is a use which dulls, and the use which brightens. With the mind as the body, disuse is a most malignant misuse, even as aggressive, active, constructive use is the price of mental youth. To fall into sluggish mental habits is as easy as to lapse into indolent physical ones. There are those, keen for body-activities, who flee mental effort as they would avoid punish- ment; others invite curtailment of physical days thru mere bodily laziness, the while maintaining unusual mental activity. Many professional men are thus constituted. We have seen the essential wisdom and relative simplicity of keeping the body young ; but no continuance of physical youth is cer- tain which does not hold fast a youthful mind as well. In fact, in such a mind lies our hope for a KEEPING THE MIND YOUNG 115 youthful body. Freshness of intellect may be maintained, or if waning, regained thru exercises as effortful, perhaps, as those necessary to re- habilitate weakened muscles. In order that this may be, one must become master of his own thoughts. For those who have responded to life's actualities for years with the dream imaginings of childhood, who have allowed wishes and fears an unopposed way in forming thought relations for these, and they are many thought control pre- sents a problem equally serious to that of rebuild- ing muscles in an arm which has hung idle forty years in the lap of ease. Most seriously must many of us take up this fundamental question of thought control and systematically force ourselves time and again each day to change our attention to other subjects, to thereby, thru will, direct our stream of thought. Most constructively and hap- pily is this done when we replace the worry-idea by constructive ones. Fred is late returning from school. His worry- mother grows anxious, runs to the door every few minutes, becomes certain that he has been struck by an auto, begins 'phoning and disturbing her neighbors then frantically clasps the young hope- ful to her flustered bosom, loving and scolding him in one breath, unheeding his story of the fight with Jim, the fight which may help make a man of him in spite of his hysterical mother. How else should a mother do? many will ask. If the mind is to be orderly, fear-inspired thoughts and worry is but fear must give place to reason-ordered plans. Fred is late, and the chances are he is playing on 116 OLD AT FORTY OB YOUNG AT SIXTY the way. If this stands for disobedience he should, of course, be helpfully punished. He may have been hurt, tho if so, the 'phone would already have rung. Has his mother carefully planned what to do in an emergency, has she selected the doctor she would call, or in his absence a substi- tute, or to which hospital he would be sent? A half-hour spent in logically thinking out the best plan of action if Fred is hurt, once done, should eliminate disconcerting anxiety for a score of future occasions and worry thus becomes con- structive anxiety. Even anxious mothers may dis- place emotional thinking with creative attention. Worry may be transformed into developing, forti- fying mental training. But persistence and de- termination must be enlisted ; for saving growth of this sort comes only thru gradual accumulation, the reward of many successfully fought conflicts. We will find ourselves developing creative at- tention through a reasonable facing of our appre- hension, and will some day realize that our critical sense, which is the mind's best, has improved, too. Not that we have become more keen in ferreting out our neighbor's faults and weaknesses, but that we are more accurately sensing values in all our estimates that better and worse are more clearly recognized and understood. This is the road lead- ing to accuracy one of the mind's most certain protectors from disorder and deterioration. Into each day should enter some effort for a better un- derstanding, for a more accurate knowledge, a finer sense of worth or a more worthy charity. Determination to so use one's mind is behind KEEPING THE MIND YOUNG 117 man's best endeavors toward the formation of the best mental habits. First let us succeed in acquiring discriminative power of thought choice and sincerity in thought revision; then we are ready to welcome the host of interests which throng each day, besieging the mind that they may enter in and enrich and beautify. The hospitable mind is opposed to the dogmatic and should be the ideal for us all. Thru its help we enlarge our vision and see beyond pots and kettles, stenographic notes and typewriters, the clink of dollars, trial balances, tangled politics and the intensities of the next election. But next to sheer ignorance, the greatest of obstacles to the enlargement of interests is no less a personage than the self-centered self. Self-attention and self-pity prove, for a wretched many, obscuring goggles shutting out the teeming, beckoning world about. Suffering and sickness breed these blind- ing qualities in the weak ; and failure of body may be anticipated thru long years by practical loss of mental vision. The local newspaper and trashy reading obtrude unprofitably, thievingly, often preempting the daily thirty to sixty minutes which could be spent year after year in pursuing a progressive course of reading. Chautauqua courses are well planned to start orderly home-study habits ; or a university extension course, in English or Domestic Science any one of the hundreds of instructive branches now offered by correspondence. These are de- signed to add to the equipment and understanding of workers in all branches of the trade and the 118 OLD AT FORTY OB YOUNG AT SIXTY arts. No mind genuinely anxious to keep itself young fails to take up between forty and fifty some developing course of study. A modern language, with comparatively little help, may be quite ade- quately self-taught in five years with a half-hour of daily study. And the resultant benefits to the mind as a whole are surprisingly gratifying and really disproportionate to the effort involved. Three Youth Preserving Qualities Three qual- ities we discover, then, are to be maintained or at- tained if we are to avoid the narrowness and tire- someness the mental inefficiency associated with old age. Certainly, if we wish to develop and utilize the possible riches which even the ordinary mind may attain thru earnest, eager daily use, alertness, capacity and accuracy are essential. Alert interest increases one's returns from every human relationship. But there is probably no mental quality which so enhances social attractive- ness. One alert mind can put sparkle into the social gathering, can step into the breach and gracefully deflect attention and relieve difficult sit- uations. In our growing collection of daily doings for youthfulness' sake, we will cultivate mental snap demanding alertness of ourselves even tho' interest should flag, until such activity becomes automatic. This may be done, for instance, by focusing our best attention at the time of an in- troduction that we may associate inseparably the stranger's face and name. Wholesomely we may decide that no day shall pass in which we do not put into fitting words a humorous situation. A good short story, the result of experience, or one KEEPING THE MIND YOUNG 119 heard and repeated, may enliven each dinner with happy effects on mind and digestion. To increase the mind's capacity that quality which no imagination has yet presumed to limit requires the daily addition of facts. These are constantly within reach of all, and any orderly study involves their acquisition. Were one per- mitted a thousand years of learning, his mind would then hold but a fraction of the knowable facts of human achievement. The pocket note- book is almost indispensable, for if we are to sys- tematically enlarge our capacity, we shall see to it that the dictionary daily spells and defines a new word or so, that the encyclopedia enlightens us on vague points in history or on obscure references. We will have a geography of our own and use it, and shall soon learn thereby that every new fact is tied to another, and that even success does not grow like knowledge. The last of the three needed qualities is the most exacting, the most elusive, the most difficult. To attain accuracy is to develop a dependable mind. But the price of this is humility, for the exactions necessary in the attainment of accuracy are most rigorous and uncompromising. All the froth of exaggerated phrases so common to-day, socially, all the false coloring of overemphasis; the not uncommon habit of making unsupportable state- ments when we are with associates who know less than we these inaccuracies must be rigorously pushed aside. Time and again we shall have to swallow our pride and make retractions when we realize that thru stress of emotions, or desire to 120 OLD AT FORTY OE YOUNG AT SIXTY excel, or in mere efforts at brilliancy, we have mis- stated. The price of accuracy is daily self-correc- tion. Minds so trained remain young years after the body ages so young that physical infirmity but heightens the supremacy of the mind 's culture. CHAPTER XI WHEN SLEEP IS A PROBLEM It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows, for so He giveth His beloved sleep. The Nature of Sleep Few realize the blessing of sleep until a few wakeful nights remove it from us. Then with revealing intensity comes the real- ization that it is one of life's greatest boons. Then we see the force and beauty in the efforts of the psalmists and of the poets to put into words the virtues of the "Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care, The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, Balm of hurt minds, . . . Chief nourisher in life's feast." Normal sleep should be the death of each day's life. And the normal sleeper falls into an uncon- sciousness as serenely peaceful as the eternal sleep. And for a span of hours there is rest, that perfect rest possible only when conflicts have ceased. So sleep the babes nestled in the fragrant down of their cribs, and the wearied laborer on his pallet of straw. And such sleep is truly the chief nourisher in life's feast. But many do not sleep normally. The drugged, under the influence of opiates or hypnotics, the 121 122 OLD AT FORTY OB YOUNG AT SIXTY sluggish, from excess of unneeded foods, lie as in a stupor. Their sleep is heaviness. Their awak- ening is without refreshment. Dully and apa- thetically, wearily, they greet the new day. The nervous as a class are light sleepers; sensitive to even minor disturbances, they are easily roused. It is surprising how instantly alert many of them are when wakened, and how comfortably they spend a life-time averaging daily six hours or even less of actual sleep. The fitful sleeper is fear- haunted and tense, sensitive not so much to his surroundings as to the unhappy, restless spirit within. For many such, restless nights are mul- tiplied, for they sleep without relaxation. And even during the night hours the "sleave of care" is still ravelled. Troubled sleep is usually the portion of those who take rest-disturbing conflicts into the night hours. Disease is a conflict of damaged tissues and organs to regain their normal condition. In it healing and damaging forces are at strife. In the dissatisfied mind there is conflict, too, between what we have and what we want. In fear there is conflict between the ability to accomplish and the weaknesses which defeat. In the fear that de- stroys the repose of sleep, there must always be a conscious or unrecognized conviction that there are forces which can damage a certain convic- tion to those who know not their souls. Con- sciences become morbid, infected by fear, too, and the misinterpreted voice of the Spirit may pervade the night thoughts to fill them with nameless terrors. WHEN SLEEP IS A PROBLEM 123 The Physical Problem One of heredity's most definite stamps is expressed in the individual's temperament, and temperaments do differ. The physician finds that, within limitations, one pa- tient will respond quite differently to a certain drug than does another. Most of us, probably, have observed the very different effects of alcohol upon varying types of individuals. At a stag banquet at two A.M. during ye olden "wet days," A would be found comfortably snoring under the table; B's head would be bobbing and nodding; C, dazed, looks on with indifferent eyes ; E apparently has kept his head; F is singing, indifferent to G's efforts to pick a quarrel with him; H is weeping and exhorting, while I is play-acting with all the gusto of mock tragedy. Analysis of this inebri- ated group proves that alcohol has been a sedative to some, an excitant to the remainder. Even more powerful drugs, as morphin, which as a rule quiets both physical and mental activity, is for a small group a definite stimulant. It is even so with tobacco. And the fact which we have just illus- trated explains largely the different results man- ifested by diverse temperaments to the toxins of defective food-oxidation. Food self-poisoning, we have learned, makes some sluggish, somnolent, dull of mind, inert of body; while to others the same poison is a whip which stings into fretfulness and restlessness, tenseness and sleeplessness. If Jack Spratt and his wife, eating both lean and fat, lick the platter clean, Jack may lie unmoving and snoring the night thru, even while Mrs. Spratt, beside him, 124 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY beats the air and tangles the sheet in her fidgets. Overeating deadened one and made the other tense. When folks have spent twenty years of muscular inactivity, they will usually accumulate toxic ma- terials which, like certain disagreeable people, fail to indicate their presence as long as you let them alone. But stir them up and there is war. And one of the first effects of a new regime of exercise among those guilty of years of muscle neglect, will be the setting loose within their circulation of their toxic enemies in quantities which will, of course, make every newly-used muscle stiff and sore, but in addition will, for some, produce dul- ness-, and for others intensity. Therefore Mr. Spratt will say, ''I am no good in the office all morning if I take those confounded spread eagles," while Mrs. Spratt will rejoin, "Well, I wish they'd treat me that way. You must be imagining, for I know they Ve kept me awake 'till three o 'clock every morning since I began them. ' ' Reason enough for ordinary Mr. and Mrs. Spratt to quit the "confounded things." And quitting the spread eagles is the first surrender the be- ginning of the end of all constructive efforts prom- ising youth at sixty. A change in regimen, if needed, will almost inevitably be followed by dis- turbances which seem at the time detrimental. Do you know the housewife who refuses- to sweep be- cause it stirs up such a dust? The Mental Problem When we consider the re- lation of mind to sleep the subject of dreams is suggested. Most satisfactory advance has been made during quite recent years in our understand- WHEN SLEEP IS A PROBLEM 125 ing of these companions of our sleep so mystical throughout the past. Observers have long real- ized that certain dreams result from the influence of physical conditions. Cartoonists convincingly portray nightmares galloping heavy-shod on over- filled stomachs. Experiments have shown the re- lation of simple irritants in reproducing definite dreams. Some dreams also result, undoubtedly, from the mind's subconscious appreciation of purely physical conditions. Our better understanding of dreams, however, is related to modern studies of the mind itself, and its reactions to its own activities. Science to-day accepts that the majority of dreams are the con- tinuations into the sleep-period of unsatisfied de- sires of the waking hours. In fact, certain teach- ers claim that all dreams are founded on wishes ungratified. Quite adroitly these teachers have disposed of another active exciter to dreams, per- sonal fears, including, of course, fear for those we love. The teachers mentioned speak of fear as inverted wish. This is a deft, but unconvincing juggling of terms. Emotional expression is in- variably associated with physical expression. Physiology clearly reveals the striking distinction between the circulatory and secretory reactions resulting from desire and fear. Fear and wish are not emotional equivalents ; they are emotional antipodes. It is an absolutely distinct stimulant which causes the dilated pupils, the dry mouth, the speechless throat, the blanched cheek of a woman in the presence of a murderous assailant, and the eager tear-coursed face, the unrestrained desire to 126 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY embrace, the joyous greeting of the same woman as her lost child is returned. Let us understand then, disturbed bodies, unsatisfied minds, and un- easy spirits may paint our dreams. The most devastating, sleep-repelling mental conflict is worry. Worry is a chronic form of fear, is fear pr.ol'onged through the days and nights as an unsatisfied anxiety anxiety for the business which means overmuch, for the love which seems to be chilling, yet which worry will but the more repel; anxiety for the safety of those who are de- pendent, worrying about whom but lessens our ability to most perfectly care for them; worry about our personal health, which but adds poison to poison. We have already seen that much of worry is secondary to physical causes. But worry may be purely mental in those who have not won mastery. Worry breeds intensity, and sleep de- mands relaxation. The Fear of Insomnia The Archdemon of Worry, whose mandate is sleeplessness, is the fear of insomnia. No more perfect soil can be pre- pared for sleepless hours than the anticipatory dread that sleep will not come. The ordinary vic- tim of insomnia begins his preparation for an open-eyed night early the morning before. He discusses in detail the horrible night he has just spent, and begins reviewing the list of influences which contributed to his wakefulness, and with growing intensity he retails and recatalogues them throughout the day, until by bedtime he is yirought up, with perceptions high-keyed and so acute that he lies straining every nerve to the ticking of the WHEN SLEEP IS A PROBLEM 127 clock, unconsciously determined not to miss the striking of an hour. Keenly alive, and resentful to the normal noises of the night, alert and dis- traught, he fights his bed into disorder, punishes his pillow as though it were the offender, disarrays sheets and covers until exhaustion brings him a period of slumber which is so unrefreshing that he is certain he has not slept. The chronic sufferer from insomnia is rare who has not hypnotized him- self into obvious falsification and even resentful denial of the hours he actually does sleep. Let us not forget that the sleep which upbuilds and refreshes, the sleep which keeps even our mornings youthful can never be won by direct ef- fort. You wish to caress the grey squirrel in the Park. You carry him nuts and coax him close. You reach out to grasp him, and he scampers away. You chase him and he scurries up a tree. Effort- fully you climb after him. He retreats to branches where you dare not venture, and mocks you. Hours you may spend, your intensity increasing with your weariness. But you might spend day after day thus and you would never coddle the squirrel. And yet he loves coddling and will come and snuggle close when you learn the gentle art of wooing him. Seat yourself at the foot of his tree, inert and comfortable, with the lunch you have brought, in your hand. Motionless you remain and quiet, and he comes and sniffs, then nearer, and eats and if he doesn't know you want him so, snuggles down beside you. Even thus unin- vited, unsought, comes sleep. Let us face fairly the relation of sleep to insan- 128 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY ity. The average person believes that sleepless- ness is a frequent cause for loss of mind. In truth the inability to sleep is but a symptom resulting from a damaging irritation to the brain, which irritation may cause both the insanity and the sleeplessness. Sleepless nights then are warnings which the wise will heed and heeding, seek expert advice, refusing to smother by drugs the voice which would direct them to safety. There is no question that when worry becomes incessant, the worry associated with chronic toxic conditions, the mind is in jeopardy, and that absolute inability to sleep, then, does stand for impending danger. Rarely is sleep a problem with those who thru the years have kept themselves physically fit. A healthy, toxin-free body will find its rest, and for the one to whom sleep is a problem our first in- junction is to read, reread and apply the chapters relating to the physical causes and preventives of old age. There is something abnormal, not ego- tistically individual nor exclusively tempera- mental, in the person who finds bodily fatigue a detriment to sleep, something abnormal which beckons on old age, something abnormal which a thimbleful of wisdom would impel one to discover and remove. There is truly no more universal wooer of sleep than honest physical weariness. Sleep or Rest? The mental tangles and emo- tional jangles we have already discussed, and the suggestions for their resolution will prove most wholesomely helpful for the nervous, if ap- proached without antagonism, and carried out with "a constructive faith. But for every sleep- WHEN 'SLEEP IS A PROBLEM 129 less individual who is not being kept awake by the physical pain of organic disease, there is an axiom which if made a truism will wholesomely and hearteningly simplify his problem: " I can rest tho ' I don 't sleep. ' ' Here is where good sense and the marvelous saving power of a trained will en- ter to rob sleepless hours of their intensity and of their terrors. Instead of turning one's couch into a torture-rack, let it be a place of relaxation, woo its comforts as tho' they were caresses. Lie quietly, not rigidly, changing position only once or twice an hour. Wretched truly is he who has not much food for grateful thought, and multiplied reasons to hope for better things in his own, or near-by lives. It is here and here only that our wills may be utilized in winning sleep. No power of volition can coax one minute of slumber, though will may overcome a multitude of sleep's enemies and smooth the way for its approach. Sleep and Drugs A volume might be written on the relation of drugs to sleep, revealing the prin- ciples involved in this serious question and illus- trating them from the pages of human suffering. But here we must be content with a few warnings. Drug sleep is a poor substitute for natural repose, no better, in fact, than peaceful wakefulness. Few habits gain ascendency over the will more rapidly than drug dependence for insomnia. No one can for a period of months depend upon drug-produced sleep and not become an insomnia-fearing coward. There is no drug known, sufficiently powerful to force sleep upon sleeplessness, which is not more or less definitely a poison to the central nervous 130 OLD AT FORTY OE YOUNG AT SIXTY system. Many, even physicians, speak of "harm- less sleep powders," but the more certainly they produce unconsciousness, the more truly are they damaging. Whether it is bromides or chloral, veronal, trional, medinol, or any one of the many compounds of these drugs, whether brandy, whis- key or even beer that one takes, he is only adding one poison to another and in the end increasing the certainty of his sleeplessness or the wretchedness of his drug slavery. There are, unquestionably, harmless, simple means which improve the circu- latory conditions favoring sleep that may be used repeatedly without harm. The cup of hot milk or broth, the ten-minute bath in neutral water (96 F.), the five-minute warm foot-bath, a tea- spoonful of tincture of asafetida in hot water, prove most beneficent helps when the trouble is not severe. But drugs should only be used on the prescription of a competent physician, who if he is competent will order them only for two or three nights during real emergencies. The safe hyp- notic for regular use will never be found. It will ever be as Solomon classed wine, "a mocker." Habit enters into the question of sleep with its wonderful power to build up or destroy ; and sleep- habits formed in babyhood are kept by some thruout life, modified only in amount. When sleep is a problem, the art of taking cat-naps should be acquired. Learn to relax the body, to forget the grind, to let go the anxieties, to think of noth- ing but the comfort which soft-fingered somno- lence brings. The art of falling asleep can be ;WHEN SLEEP IS A PROBLEM 131 self taught, and when once learned, the mishap of waking untimely will be only an incident. The Morning Sleeper There is a type of poor sleeper who deserves no sympathy, tho' as a rule this is his stock in trade. Many fail to find the sleep they claim to seek until the early morning hours. To meet this difficulty they give emphatic orders that they are not to be disturbed till ten or eleven o 'clock and they sleep with a vengeance through all the busy sounds of uprisings and breakfast gettings. They ''didn't get to sleep till two." They "woke up at nine." Alas! Truly their habit is nothing but an excuse for lying abed in the morning. If they are unceremoniously yanked out at six A.M. willy-nilly, few nights would pass before eleven o 'clock would find them snoring. But most vehemently these individuals deny that from eleven to six is in the same class as from two to nine. The insomnia of morning-sleepers re- pudiates mathematics. David realized that there were those who failed to find sleep through either early rising or late retiring. He saw clearly that worry, or as he called it, "eating the bread of sorrows," was a sleep-getting failure. He knew the sick of soul for whom physical help and improved mental habits availed nothing, for an unhappy spirit is deadly potent in driving sleep away from those whose consciences are sensitive. And it is to these he refers when he so beautifully writes, "He giveth His beloved sleep." Are not His beloved those men and women who thru their waking hours live the best they know, and who, when the night comes, with its approaching period of helpless un- consciousness, in a faith which reason cannot shake, leave their unsolved problems in the hands of the Providence which placed them in a life of mysteries and conflicts, of defeats and victories? Are not His beloved those who at the bedtime hour place their all in the keeping of their Maker, and thus bury worries and anxieties and fears, enmi- ties and vaulting ambitions in that same trust which makes the sleep of the child so perfect? "Of all the thoughts of God that are Borne inward into souls afar Along the Psalmist 's music deep Now tell me if that any are For gift or grace, surpassing this He giveth His beloved sleep ? ' ' CHAPTER XH SUNSHINE OR SHADOWS Be of good cheer Shadows We hear the word Nature used and often indefinitely, to represent manifestations of power. But is not all which we loosely bundle under this term a recognized expression of law and order? So true is this that the heathen's worship of fire and his bowing down to age-defying stone are not without their glimmer of reason. Nature understood proves to be intelligence struggling to- ward expression. This becomes clearer when we consider human nature; and from this point of view, an analytic one indeed, life is seen as man's opportunity for self-expression. Stone is most limited in its ability to express in- telligence. It can but mutely resist and endure. Fire exercises a far larger freedom. It selects this and rejects that. It serves when it must. It triumphs when it can. But the soul of man, who can set its limits! Who can stay its progress? And to each of us may not the question profitably come, "How is this life of mine expressing itself? " I am a business man. Have I become a business machine, eating and sleeping and theatre-going that I may grind the more productively? I am a social follower, possibly a social leader. Do 133 134 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY functions and pride of appearance, the struggle to attain a higher status, a carking fear lest I lose caste, do these stand for the whole expression of my being? Or is amusement my single aim? Am I a sport, reading, thinking, talking sport alone, being amused or miserable, being entertained or unhappy? Am I a church-member attending every service of the sanctuary thru force of habit the ritual for me but a mummery spirit- ually without growth thru the years? Is home but a place to eat and sleep and change apparel? Are parents and relatives objectives at whom I direct my ill-nature? Is their ease considered when my own is in question? Am I thus narrow- ing and darkening the great way of life, wretchedly limiting my expression of the marvelous oppor- tunities which life, to-day more than all days that have gone, offers so without limit ? It is significant in man's record in the past, and in the record of the majority to-day that the gloom- life is much in excess of the cheer-life. Note your neighbor 's household. Acquaint yourself with the disposition of his chauffeur, his cook, his butler, his children, of himself and the Madam. Of the ten, three only, probably, will reveal the cheer of happiness for the rest, depression, fault-finding, habitual surrender to morbidness, a sullen accept- ance of the "miseries of existence," surliness, a hang-dog dejection, unwholesome suspicion. Ugh ! What an ugly list ! While thus visiting let us look into our neighbor's kitchen and see what his cook does with the good food the market-man brings. Is she not prone to overcook the meat, to SUNSHINE OR SHADOWS 135 overseason the soup, to leave blotches of heavy grease floating on the gravy, to boil the tea bitter, to send in the coffee muddy? How much good food is spoiled in the preparation! Let us look into the kitchen of our own souls. We have clever- ness, strength of will, ability, abounding physical health, a gift of speech, an artistic instinct, facile fingers. Opportunity not only knocked, but has long nestled on our doorstep. Eiches lie un- touched in the vaults of our bank, but our lives have been spoiled by ugly moods. How often the cook fails in his chef d'osuvre for lack of a mere dash of seasoning. How many thousands doubly blessed by heredity and environment have missed happiness because they have failed to add the sea- soning of cheer. Youth without cheer is conspicu- ously abnormal. Seriousness is usually associated with maturity and the procession of the senile is proverbially one of gloom. And pity 'tis, 'tis true but the greater pity is, that 'tis so, when it need not be. We almost habitually speak of the lengthening shadows of old age, and gloom-habits express indolence of the soul as truly as physical sloth is shown thru restricted activities. The gloom-self often starts early. The day we begin to wall ourselves in, we shut some of the sunshine out. And as we build that wall which separates us from our neighbor, the gloom within increases. It may start as mere social exclusiveness, a de- fense to a haunting, unfaced unworthiness. More often the selfishness which fears to lose by sharing, which guards personal ease as a precious treasure, turns life into a cave of gloom where we live re- 136 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY mote from our kind, companioned by the bats which stand for fear of loss. Alone, too, self -im- prisoned and shunned is the arrogantly wretched, sour-souled pessimist who finds no good in past, present or future, in man, woman or God. Firelight Less and less frequently do we sit on the hearth-rug and read fairy-pictures in the lap- ping flame and the glowing embers of the burning back log. How almost sacred do the hours we have so spent seem in retrospect. For most of us the cheer of the fire's blaze is found these days in the coal-grate. Yet merrily it too can laugh! How thrillingly its oozing black bubbles burst into an incandescent tongue, alternating with a spout- ing grey plume of flame-eager smoke. With what significant comradery the black lumps melt into a congenial oneness, and interlocked, char and glow and diffuse every atom of their wealth of warmth before they ashen and drop inert. For scores of years the back-log gathered into its sinews strength and heat from the sun, for untold centuries the shovelful of coals held fast its golden flame and, treasuring the cheer of forgotten ages, kept inviolate the tropic's kiss for a cold, spec- ulative, gloomy day. Then in a burst of cheer, in the fulness of service it gives back every caress its sun-mother gave. Our forefathers shivered and half-starved on their unproductive farms, ignorant of the bound- less wealth so close to the hungry tooth of their plows. But even when found, coal and petroleum have been released from their ages-old recesses only thru human toil and sacrifice. And all of SUNSHINE OR SHADOWS 137 this we are so prone to forget as we allow the firelight to woo us from strenuous facts to restful revery. We forget, too, that even as the riches of remote days have dropped beneath the earth's surface to be used in time of future need, so each hour 's experience of our own lives is slipping more or less completely from Memory's sight into the recesses of our subconscious, and unthinkingly each day is adding to the store-house of this mysterious, yet tremendously determining uncon- scious self. Into it has dropped all which we think we have forgotten. Into it, appalled, fever- ishly, we crowd out of sight that which we would hide. In it accumulate all experiences, whether involving a minute 's time or a day 's. Out of sight Yes ! but immiment of discovery, often ready for instant re-use. Ominously each happening slowly loses distinctiveness and becomes part of a fateful background which ultimately controls every spon- taneous thought and act. Thus, from our attitude of the moment, the attitude beautifying or defac- ing each act, certain ones will gradually so pre- ponderate as to control our subconscious atmos- phere. So our moods are made ! Let us stop and think. What is my spontaneous feeling when, for instance, I meet a stranger ? Is it a desire to keenly and cleverly discover his faults? We may be sure he has them. Is it, for conceit's sake, to underestimate his worth? Is it, pharisaically, to pity him in his shortcomings? Is it, for truth's sake, to find his worth that I may respect and honor and profit? Some of us are ever suspicious, some always credulous, a few un- 138 OLD AT FORTY OB YOUNG AT SIXTY remittingly fair. What emotion speaks loudest, when inconvenienced? Impatience, resentment, sharp anger? Does it take a curse or so to dissi- pate the tension? Or do I summon reason or gentleness, or consideration for the other fellow, who may be even harder hit? What is my de- fense in the face of criticism? Some lie openly. Some deceive themselves first, and then lie. Others find in an unfounded conceit a comfortable shield. Still others dumbly ignore it minimizes effort. A few are thoughtful and seek in the crit- icism the new point of view which its half truth offers. Some of us become tense, and chuck our boilers full of inflammables, raising brain-pressure threateningly, and, making a habit of so doing, with no safety valves of tolerance or cheerful pa- tience, find ourselves abed, much nursed and doc- tored and badly paralyzed because Mrs. Neigh- bor criticised the up-to-date cut of Wife's last evening dress. What does praise bring out of our subconscious? The preening strut of added self- satisfaction, a truth-obscuring after-glow of cheaply won contentment, an unsafe trust and confidence in him who so glibly flattered or here, and here is its place, a rectifying doubt, an honest balancing of the good and the mediocre? Have we not seen that the emotions which we allow to mingle with each happening become a part of every experience ; that multiplied experiences determine our moods ; and that, ultimately, despite multiplied resolutions, our subconscious moods merge into and become character. Sunshine Is it not true for every man who pro- SUNSHINE OB SHADOWS 139 fesses manhood, for every woman who claims womanhood, that the gloom or cheer of their lives is of their own making? Sorrow will bring sad- ness. It cannot force gloom. Plenty opens the door of pleasure. No gold can buy happiness. Is not life sordid to the greedy, narrow to the ignor- ant, ugly to him whose subconscious is embittered with hate? Does not the artist's mind find beauty in weeds and lowliness and simplicity ? And is not life more happy to the cheerful than to any other group of the children of men? No matter what our age in years, in spite of any infirmity of the flesh, or emptiness of purse, or loss of companion- ship, cheer will continue to add the beautifying touch of youth to every relation of life. At forty most of us have lost, thru neglect, the cheer impulse of early days and if the spirit is to be renewed and youth of the spirit is the only youth which will endure thru all it must be fought for. Did any man start with less and re- ceive less from others thru his early days, than Lincoln? Was there ever a face into which sad- ness has graven more deeply her lines, until in repose it might have been tragedy's mask of sor- row? But whenever he touched human lives it was with the touch of tenderness or cheer. In- opportunely, his critics said, he would tell one of his inexhaustible stories, nor was any situation ever so grave that he did not attempt to brighten by a flash of his kindly humor. A soul, his, which bravely and unswervingly refused to be buried un- der the multiplying sorrows of heritage, poverty of early advantages, misunderstanding, detraction, 140 OLD AT FORTY OB YOUNG AT SIXTY enmity and the tremendous responsibilities of his country's darkest hour. And was it not his fight for cheer which helped keep his thought life so re- markably free from self-pity, suspicion and jeal- ousy? His was never a frothy optimism, a mere pretense of good where good was not, but an in- domitable cheer, a virile virtue possible only when the sunshine of past days has been preserved in the treasury of the subconscious. Aged indeed we are when we have not cheer for at least a select few. But this is far from stand- ing for wealth of cheer expression it too often is but a contrast relief, giving variety and thus add- ing selfish enjoyment to miserly, common and sordid lives. Where is the soul so gloom-cluttered that, devoutly wishing to bear the spirit of youth to the end, may not, with faith in the ageless Divine, become more and more imbued with the true spirit of cheer? Ten years of hourly cheer thinking, ten years with no day devoid of some act of self-f orgetfulness and gratuitous, cheerful serv- ice will do it. But how much more quickly the perfect cheer comes when the heart within is kind. Then with certainty may every sorrow be trans- muted into song. Of one so evolved we may speak as does the Arab poet of his hero : Sunshine was he On the winter's day ; And in the midsummer Coolness and shade. CHAPTER "Youth shows but half; trutt God, see all, nor be afraid." The Weight of Years It is significant that the common estimate of old age is made in terms of loss. Shakespeare most vividly pictures this an aged one in "second childishness and mere oblivion/' lacking teeth, hair, sight, taste, with- ered and wrinkled and altogether unattractive. Even Solomon, with his wisdom, when rising to one of his most perfect poetic flights, in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, relates only decrepitude, fearsomeness and loneliness. But both Solomon and Shakespeare observed and recorded in the days when Science was primitive, when physicians were few and more apt to be charlatans and tricks- ters than masters of their then crude art while dentists were unknown. Calories, food values, nutritional balancing, bacteria, infection and the equation of personal resistance were then un- thought. The revelations of mental science point- ing definitely to decrepitating errors of thought and feeling were vaguely visioned and but rarely applied. For long, surprisingly long generations, physical and mental life were ordered in weirdly haphazard ways. David believed that fourscore 141 142 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY years were possible only by reason of individual strength, and that the extra ten added to man's allotted seventy stood for sorrow. Our own generation is truly the first in the his- tory of mankind when a scientific, constructive study, promising a happy lengthening of days is possible. We have already learned that much of the weight of years can be lightened. It is an unquestioned fact that the average person of sixty- five, when examined thoroughly, will be found to have an undermined constitution, with vital organs underactive, a victim already of hardening arter- ies. He is gripped fast by scores of physically and mentally damaging habits, which he is fairly helpless to break because his limited outlook has robbed him of initiative. He lives, a practical au- tomaton, hopeless in the apathy of fatally nar- rowed interests. All this the regular physician finds. The soul doctor sees even more. With him the evidences of senility are revealed when he dis- covers that the uplift of hope and the faith that never faileth, are mere hollow echoings of a voice which has not spoken for years. He finds men in early senility garrulous, wearisomely so, and women gossipy, destroyingly so. And for them both retrospect has grown more and more vivid, even as prospect is dimmed and fading. The best for these unhappy ones has already been, and rightfully may genius and wisdom and seer paint age in terms of loss. By such, old age has, too frequently throughout the past, been unhappily represented. And to every mind that is thought- ful the knowledge comes clear that it is not THE BEST IS YET TO BE 143 wrinkled features which have repelled, but the wrinkled soul within. Every age has its burdens which are considered intolerable by those who have not developed re- sources of the spirit. Nor can we question that these burdens become doubly baneful as the shadows lengthen. But every change in the way of life faces difficulties. Childhood prepares for youth, and youth makes ready for adolescence, and the years of young maturity strive that they may the more perfectly meet the burdens of middle life. And is not the secret here revealed, that mid-life slips into age defeated or satisfied, in either case failing to put forth any purposeful ef- fort, that later days may be better days ? Do not the majority merely drift and ground on the bar and go to pieces in the wash of the tide, rather than take advantage of the flow, and safely cross when they put into the harbor of last years I The Science of Growing Old We have studied many details which, without a question, will in- crease the number of useful days for the large majority who will heed. The essential causes of untimely decrepitude have been clearly revealed to the thoughtful reader. The science of medicine is rapidly removing the mysteries which, through all past time, have shrouded deficient nutrition, or- ganic heart disease, swift striking paralysis, the criminally common Bright 's disease. Even can- cer, the insidious, that deadly foe of age, is sub- ject to the ceaseless investigation of scores of the world's best laboratories, and will soon be routed from its secret lair. We already know that the 144 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY soil in which it so malignly thrives, can be made practically barren by simple habits of self-denial. And to-day, and increasingly as the days of knowl- edge unfold, will the majority of untimely deaths and useless physical and mental weakness, now spoken of hopelessly as "old age," be the result of the individual's choice and not, as in the past, the unhappy, inexplicable residuum of ignorance. Five extra years have been given to men and women under fifty thru medical conquest of the infections so common to youth. Ten years can and should be added to the days over fifty when wisdom and self-mastery are raised to leadership. Psychology, like some of our neighbors, has quite outdone itself in pointing out our faults. We are now able to analyze to a hair's breadth the measure of each other's mental deficiencies. An- alytic psychology is disconcertingly far ahead of constructive psychology. We are hearing much of reeducational methods, and goodness knows! there is a world of it to be done. Education it- self seems to some hopelessly conservative, and has for years been occupying the position of pre- paring armies of men and women to be "reedu- cated" or go to smash. But there is hope. Even to-day one large college is matriculating pupils on the basis of their ability to use their minds right not on the basis of what has been stuffed into their wits for entrance-examination purposes. And as time goes on our educators will be more and more educated in the sense that they will stand as lead- ers in the way of intelligent living. Examples as old as history have been before us THE BEST IS YET TO BE 145 so long that it would seem that our mental ways of living should, generations ago, have been mended. Solon grew old " daily learning some- thing new." Cicero, studying Greek at eighty- four writes, "For a man who lives in the midst of studies and labors does not perceive when old age creeps upon him." Did he not also express it perfectly that relation of the mind to old age when he said, "Appius kept his mind at full stretch like a bow, and never gave in to old age by becoming slack." The Church, as well as the pagans, has produced many venerable "happy saints" in the flesh, and when all else has been said, the worship of God has gone further to beau- tify and to win protection and respect for man's declining years than any other factors of the past. The "Honour thy father and mother," of the Hebrews, the ancestor worship of Confucianism, the accepted tenets of Christianity who can tell the added years which, in happiness, they have given to the old! Too often have all religions in the darkness of their ignorance of true causes of suffering and disease been forced into a blind fatalism which looked beyond the veil for the only lasting joys. But when the science and the art of growing old are ours, future beatitudes can truly be previsioned in the days that are. The Good Part The faults of old age, fretful- ness, intolerance, ill temper, stinginess, tiresome- ness are not necessarily defects of declining years more than of maturity. Accurately speaking, whenever occurring in life they are faults of char- acter. All complaints that old age is friendless 146 OLD AT FORTY OR YOUNG AT SIXTY should be ascribed to an uninteresting personality or an unlovable nature. That the later years are not the richest ones cannot be charged against man or God, but only to self. "If one has lived much as well as long, the harvest is wonderful." For centuries there have been those searching the face of the earth for a "Fountain of Youth/' for some rejuvenating waters, a draught of which would put at naught the law of the decades. The Alchemist sought in vain for the transmuting drug which would cause the withered cheek to bloom again, the dulling eyes to regain their brilliance, scrawny hands to return to softness and plumpness, and drying muscles to feel once more the resistless vigor of youth. It has never been found, it never will be found. The body is born, it develops, it maintains its right of health and strength under divine laws, secularly spoken of as physics and chemistry. The mind mounts from its lowly es- tate to the wisdom of the philosopher, the bril- liance of genius, the leadership of a Caesar under God Yes ! For the laws of psychology are His. The laws of physics and chemistry and of mental science reveal no miraculous growth or re- version. A thin ring each year marks tile increase in the oak's girt, a fact or two each day the un- folding of the mind. A resolution made once a week or a month and maintained thru the years tells of the development of the will. For the body and mind it is to-day a little, to-morrow a little. Only step by step, do they grow. Do we crave the plenty of a spiritualized old age? Then the one miracle of human develop- THE BEST IS YET TO BE 147 ment which is ours to choose the soul's turning away from the selfish things of self, to a self- effacing life of cheerful service for our kind! Then slowly, di scour agin gly, wearisomely so at first, may the soul drag its mind and body back to the heights which the years have not known, be- cause we have forgotten that the only youth which can abide through all, is a youth of the Spirit. Having chosen that good part it shall not pass away! Maturity is in its full. To-morrow for most of those of our age, it will begin to wane. Which shall it be? A senility which stands for gradual, irrevocable, heart-dulling loss; or the growth of that only self which knows not age, that growth which makes the years to glow as a halo, lightening the face until it seems to radiate a spirit fairly crowding its inadequate frame, reaching forth, it would seem, in anticipation of immortal freedom 1 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY SOUTHERN BR UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LIBRARY, LOS ANC,,