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pressing yellow fever, repressing malaria, and unhooking the hookworm in a score of countries? What will come of the human energy thus released? What in the long run will be the result of establishing modern medical schools in China for training doctors for its 300,000,000 people?

I must not close without mention of the psychological effects of the introduction of gasoline, its influence on the mind of man. A horseman realizes that he is dealing with a wilful, capricious, and perhaps vicious animal, whose conduct will be affected by his own temper. Anger has no effect on an auto engine. To display or even feel any emotion toward it is simply silly. The substitution of machinery for all slave and animal power, and even in large part for personal service, must in the long run have very profound effects on human character.

The

A professor of psychiatry tells me that he prescribes automobile driving for certain types of nervous patients, especially such as suffer from inability to concentrate their minds on anything outside of themselves, or who are deficient in quick decision. The chauffeur who hesitates is lost. automobile obviously cultivates celerity of decision on the part of the pedestrian as well as the driver. When the automobile first came into use it was said that it was dividing the population into two classes: the quick and the dead. This has ceased to be a joke. More than 12,000 persons are killed a year in the United States through automobiles. . . The management of a machine gives one a feeling of personal power, much like that of the consciousness of controlling other human beings, but less harmful in its reflex effect on the possessor. The sense of power is doubt

less one of the chief reasons for the fondness for fast driving.

Hardly had the automobile been born before it began to complain about the roads. Especially in America. In Europe the roads were better than ours, thanks to the Romans, who whenever they conquered a country made a good road through it leading straight to Rome, and so solid that it lasts to this day. So we resolved to mend our ways and have done wonders in a few years. Although the improvement of the highways is chiefly due to the demands of the motor car, it eases the labor of the surviving horses. It is estimated that motor vehicles paid into the state, national, and municipal treasuries, in registration and license fees, $341,300,000 in 1921.

With a network of good roads covering the country and with vehicles that require no other track, our population has acquired a flexibility of movement that has amazing consequences.

The transformation of the farm by motor fuel, striking as it seems, is only beginning. The human muscular labor that has been so largely eliminated from the factory is still the mainstay of the farm. But the gasoline motor may do for the farmer what the steam engine could not. For the motor is small, light, portable, cheap, and easily managed. In many places gasoline has knocked the picturesque milkmaid off her stool; for a motor will milk a dozen cows at a time and never complain of the chores. the mechanical milkmaid is more sanitary. We may hope also to see the man with the hoe supplanted by the man with the Ford. His brow will not slant as much, for the farmer of the future will have to be a high-brow to manage power machinery. W. W., N. '22.

And

Your Right to Happiness

Condensed from The Health Builder

(The new periodical published by Doubleday, Page & Co.)
Walter Camp

UR forefathers said, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." In the Middle Ages no one dared even pursue happiness; nay, men were warned away from it by their religious leaders who bade them hunger and thirst after the future life alone. But in Ancient Greece there was a real experiment in Happiness, and it bore fruit. Basking in her balmy air, washed by her halycon summer seas, equipped with temples, philosophers, and athletes, ancient Greece in great measure achieved Happiness.

Here you have two of mankind's high-spots: you have Hellas, teeming with happy enthusiasms, you have the Middle Ages, morose with dirt and the plague, spurning Happiness like a sin. Then you have the experiment in Happiness which brought this sorry period to a close. For after the gloom of the Middle Ages came the fantastic but beautiful illumination of the Renaissance. Renaissance: that means re-birth. And what was reborn? What but that for which Greece stood: enthusiasm for the mind; enthusiasm for the body; enthusiasm for this world with all its charming sights and sounds that lie on the surface-with all its intriguing secrets that lie in hidden places. Today's science, today's big business, engineering feats -all the worthwhileness of our Twentieth Century-are children of Greece and the Renaissance-children of that enthusiasm which is at least the mother of happiness.

What then is the mother of enthusiasm? Good health. Surely the Greeks furnish that answer. Was it for nothing that the most enthusiastic and also the ablest people who have ever lived upon this planet were

also the most athletic? The Greeks had, it is true, the advantage of a glorious climate; but they did not fail to follow up this advantage by building for themselves glorious bodies besides, and it was out of good bodily condition that they saw the world glorious and set about exploring it with the eagerness of two healthy boys in a canoe. On the other hand it was out of bad condition that the men of the Middle Ages saw life in drab colors. As for the Renaissance, it cleaned up the filth and was better fed, all of which was a boon to the body; but neither the Renaissance nor those who drew up our Declaration of Independence attained unto a proper regard for the body itself. They were preoccupied with the preliminaries, the political and economic blessings which give the body its chance.

In daring to suggest that we now finish this work by building a body worthy of its advantages, as the Greeks did, I do not mean to deny the ultimate supremacy of mind over matter. The heroism that cheerfully goes without what it cannot havethis is the final conqueror of happiness. But the spirit of the hero cannot escape the influence of the soil from which it grows. If you breathe impure air, do you escape tuberculosis? If you work in a lead mine unprotected, do you not go mad from poison? Has not madness sprung from the poison of an abscess at the root of a tooth? Certain glands of the body, hitherto not understood, are now coming to be called "glands of personality." If this phrase is exaggerated, still the fact remains that these so-called ductless glands, if allowed to become goiters or merely to

go feeble for lack of exercise, can drag you down to cowardice or lunacy or the Slough of Despond. Until, therefore, the body has had a better deal than any one except the Greeks have given it, we ought not to decide that Happiness is only a will-o'the-wisp.

But even if you dub happiness a will-o'-the-wisp for yourself, you blush not to snatch at it for your child. It is for him you work. Are you going to give him-will your the Twentieth Century give him things that really make for happiness? Although we have cleaned up the plagues which grew out of the filth and poverty of the Middle Ages, our own we have stumbled upon Twentieth Century pitfalls of organic disease. Plagues are gone, but glands, teeth, and all bodily organs still tend to deteriorate day by day, and they do it in new Twentieth Century ways, largely by reason of the same work which you perform for your child's happiness and which he himself cannot escape when his turn comes. The fly in the Twentieth Century ointment is this: that the enthusiasm which we had from the Greeks has slighted one of the objects of a wise Greek enthusiasm, the body. not refer to athletes, but to breadwinners. For each new bread-winning invention of enthusiasm itself often turns out in this Twentieth Century to be an enemy as well as a friend-an economic friend, a physiologic enemy. What if typewriters, telephones, aircraft-children, to be sure, of a glorious enthusiasmshould, nevertheless, turn upon the very capacity for enthusiasm and strangle it? Already those who labor at the bottom of the social pyramid are enthusiastically unenthusiastic. Do not talk to an audience of work

I do

ingmen about the joy of work. When
Doctor Eliot did that he heard only
guffaws. The men of the Middle
Ages did get some consolation out
of their beautiful hand-crafts. Crafts
today have gained in speed but lost
in interest. All the more, then, the
health of the craftsman must not lose
To that
at all but entirely gain.
end, this Twentieth-Century Indus-
trial Civilization of ours needs an
antidote the Daily Dozen and more.

That boy of yours-that girl-are as worthy of this as they are of your money. Let us take stock together as to this Twentieth-Century Health and Happiness business. Help your children-and yourself-toward new Declaration of Independence; one that shall include your right to Happiness.

a

I know that happiness comes from health, not from wealth.

If I have a stake in life it is worth playing the game for all there is in it.

I know that envy, jealousy and wrath will ruin any digestion.

I know that the only thing I really own is my body and that it is worth good

care.

I know that nature will not stand for constant over-drafts any more than my bank.

I know that worry is the most unhealthful thing in the world.

I know that anger poisons the system. I know that I have a birthright of health and will not exchange it for a mess of disease.

I know that if I increase my exercise for every addition to my salary I shall be better able to enjoy that salary. H. B., N., '22.

"Allow me to say I have never found any publication that has given me as much satisfaction as The Reader's Digest. Most sincerely and with a real enthusiasm I commend it to my friends."-J. F. G., Columbus, O.

A

The Meaning of Beauty

Condensed from Good Housekeeping

Mabel Dill

PESSIMIST wrote to me a few months ago: "How can I believe in God, when I see all the ugliness and suffering that are in the world." Later, I was walking down the street, thinking what I should reply. And I happened to look up and saw a lovely tree-a green and glowing tree against a blue sky. InMy stantly I had what I sought. friend had forgotten that most of the ugliness and the suffering is manmade. He had forgotten the woods, the sea, the sky, the flowers, the birds. He had forgotten beauty!

I walked on, away from the city, into the woods. Great trees crowded close about me. A cardinal-red as an autumn leaf-perched on a fallen trunk. Now and then a wren sent forth its little soul in a veritable fountain of song. Even the soil seemed wonderful, the mosses were infinitely interesting, and oh, the clean fragrance of that air, the grace of those thousands of twigs and branches against the summer sky!

I thought of other beautiful scenes -the great, blue spread of the ocean, thick with white-caps, tremendous canyons, haughty mountain ranges shouldering their way against the sky, friendly little hills, and bits of wood and pasture. I thought of the beauty in color, in form, in light, in shadow, in sound-a golden moon, the splendor of the sky in the west, a rainbow, the whispering of the wind in the trees, the magnificent din of the thunder, the music of a master's violin. I remembered the beauty in

movement-Pavlowa's dancing, children playing, water rippling, smoke curling upward.

And I came to the beauty in men -beauty of body and mind, the beauty of friendship and of love.

And I saw that beauty floods the universe, that it is everywhere, if we will only see it. But some of us are blind, with selfishness or with ignorance. And some of us are given to worry-which is like a bandage over the eyes. And others are too sick to see. To enjoy beauty one must be well-physically, mentally, spiritu

ally.

One day in New York I saw a foul old man. As I looked, I saw that old man smile; never have I seen lovelier smile; never have I heard any sound more tender than was that old man's voice as he bent to speak to his little dog.

It is there in every one--beauty!

-very deep down sometimes, but there latent, struggling. Beauty is God-one of God's expressions of His nature, one of His ways of letting us know what He is like-a proof that God is good, generous in His bounty beyond all our imaginings. Later, my friend, the pessimist admitted, "Perhaps I have been blind." And still later-when he had thought more and lived more came this letter: "I have been wrong. I have been going against my very nature. No more saying there is no God! There is a God. I have found Him." Gd. H., D., '22.

(Continued from page 586) of party and come together as a unit. It is only then that true patriotism comes to the surface and that we realize what an unnecessary and vicious thing partisanship is.

To vote by mail is the only rational and practical method of voting in the twentieth century among a people where public schools are obligatory and universal. Our present system of voting in person disfranchises a vast number of our citizens, temporarily away from home on business or pleasure.

Voting by mail can be as accurate as voting in person. Each voter's signature being registered in the district could be verified by the judges. It would be as dangerous to falsify a signature as it is to forge a check. Banks depend upon the signatures of their customers, and forgeries are negligible. The ballot sent in by mail could be as secret as the present ballot. It could be in a sealed envelope to which is attached a perforated slip whereon the signature of the citizen should be written, this envelope and slip to be contained in a larger envelope addressed to the schoolhouse. In this way the judges

could check up every man's vote, all the ballots after the signatures were detached could be thrown together, and thus the secrecy of the ballot maintained. Voting by mail would be infinitely cheaper and simpler than the present system. No citizen who is unable to make his own signature should be allowed to vote. At least it ought to take that much intelligence.

The chief advantage of this plan is that it brings the government close to the people. At present to get the people's real opinion on any subject involves a long and laborious process. If we had this plan of voting we I could get the opinion of the people on any issue, such as prohibition or the League of Nations, quickly and decisively. The closer a government is to the people and the more constantly it must return to the people for instruction, the fresher it is kept and the cleaner from corruption. If we will only adopt some such plan as this by which the government can always be kept in touch with the people, we shall come nearer towards securing a government "for the people, of the people and by the people." Cur. Op., D., '22.

MAILING ANNOUNCEMENT

Beginning with the January number, The Digest will be published on the 15th of each month. Hereafter, each issue will be made up very largely of articles from magazines of the CURRENT month-a feature that will add further to the value of the Digest Service.

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