PHYSICAL CULTURE AS A RELIGION

A Growing Faith, Beautiful and Stern

FLOYD DELL

THE words "physical culture" suggest to you, perhaps, the morning, or bathroom, exercises (with a Whitely "exerciser") of some sedentary worker who has been told by a physician; that ten minutes a day of this hideous discipline will improve his digestion and lengthen his life. That is not the real thing at all. The real thing is a religious faith —beautiful and stern, and quite remote from ordinary life. This religion is to be apprehended best by a little association with its ardent devotees.

These people move among us as equals, and talk the same language; but they really live in a different world. They breathe the same air, but they breathe it with a consciousness of the importance, the sacredness of the process of breathing. They believe in the dignity and beauty of the body, including the alimentary canal.

IN the main, their philosophy inclines them to asceticism. Not only would they have no more cakes and ale in the world (cake is indigestible and alcohol is a poison), but they would abolish white bread and coffee. The cigarette which I sit smoking as I write this is a pollution of my body for which they pity and scorn me. "You would write nobler and more God-like articles," they say, "if you didn't smoke cigarettes."

Complete prohibition of the sale and use of all drugs (including alcohol, tea, coffee, tobacco); a change in medical practice which would forbid all medicines and nearly all surgical operations:—these are merely the beginnings of the profound revolution which their philosophy of life implies. In a physical culture world our modern system of education, at desks, with text-books, in old-fashioned schoolrooms, would give place to an outdoor school in which every child would be healthy and happy. Children would be told so much about sex that they would transfer their curiosity to mathematics and civil engineering. Shoes, corsets, and almost everything else in the nature of clothing would be abolished. Men and women would go about the streets looking like Greek gods and goddesses, and those that didn't look like them would either asphyxiate themselves in shame or immediately go into training.

THE folly of romance would disappear from the world. Or would it? A young man with the right height and weight would meet a young woman of the right hulk and tonnage—first they would compare weights, diets, muscles, and then discuss gravely the question of . whether they were destined to matrimonial felicity because of a perfect eugenical similarity, and then the young woman would ask him if she might have the honor of sharing his morning Swobodas, nut diet and breathing exercises. It would be noble and exalted and wise; nothing of prudishness on the one hand, nor of recklessness on the other. They would be as chaste a pair as ever breathed deep and long o'er Eden. Their nuptials would be celebrated in outing suits, under the stormy winter sky.

IN their physical culture world there would be no pangs of hopeless love, or love deferred; no torment of jealousy, no agony of heartbreak; no insane cycle of hopeless, useless memories. These things would be unworthy of a young woman with the arm and thigh measurements of a marble Greek goddess. She would take a walking trip, or engage in a swimming contest, and be herself again. Not that the young woman with the perfect measurements has things "figured out" in exactly that way. Her intentions perhaps extend but little further than making her fiance stop smoking cigarettes. But there are others who have the thing all mapped out in their minds. They find in the right development of the body a cure for all the maladies of the soul Animalism, insanity, drunkenness jealousy, vice,—all of these are to disappear at the magic touch of physical culture. Standing erect (a thing you and I hate to do), breathing deep (with just enough tissue-building cereals in their digestive storehouses), their nerve-cells unpolluted by the effects of caffeine, nicotine or alcohol; with their pores open and their phagocytes just right, they front the world with a quaint and quite magnificent confidence.