(deals with the question of exercise, both for the idle and the overworked.)
in discussing the important question of exercise, there is one fundamental fact to begin with: that our present civilization divides men sharply into two classes, those who do not get enough exercise, and those who get too much. obviously it would be folly to make the same recommendations to the two classes.
i begin with those who get too much exercise. they include a great number, probably the majority of those who do the manual work of the world. they include the farmers and the farm-hands, who work from dawn to sunset, and sometimes by lantern light. they include also the farmers' wives, the kitchen slaves of whom the old couplet tells:
"man's work ends from sun to sun,
but woman's work is never done."
i am aware that men have worked that way for countless ages, and yet the race is still surviving; but i am aware also that men wither up with rheumatism, and contract chronic diseases of the kidneys and the blood vessels, consequent upon the creation of greater quantities of fatigue poisons than the body can regularly eliminate.
i have very little interest in the past, and none whatever in finding fault with it. my purpose is to criticize the present for the benefit of the future, and therefore i say that modern machinery and the whole development of modern large-scale production make it absolutely unnecessary that women should slave all their waking hours in kitchens, or that men should slave all day. i say it is monstrous folly that men should work for twelve-hour stretches in steel mills, and for ten and eleven hours in factories and mines. organized labor has adopted the slogan, "eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for play"; but my slogan is "four hours for work, four hours for study, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for play."
i know, and am prepared to demonstrate to any thinking man, that modern civilization can produce, not merely all the necessities, but all the comforts of life for every man, woman and child in the community, by the expenditure of four hours a day work of the adult, able-bodied men and women. so to all the wage slaves of the factories and mines, the fields and the kitchens, i say that too much exercise is what is the matter with you, and what you need is to get off in a quiet nook in the woods and read a good novel, not merely for a few hours, but for a few months, until you get over the effects of capitalist civilization. i know that not many of you can get away as yet, but i urge you to insist upon getting away, to fight for the chance to get away; and i will here suggest a few of the novels for you to read when finally you do get away. i choose the easy ones, which the dullest and most tired of you will love; i say, make up your mind to read these thirty-two books before you die, and do not let the world cheat you out of your chance!
mark twain: a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court. charles d. stewart: the fugitive blacksmith. w. clark russell: the wreck of the grosvenor. r. l. stevenson: treasure island, kidnapped. jack london: the sea wolf, the call of the wild, martin eden. joseph conrad: youth. h. g. wells: the war of the worlds, when the sleeper wakes, the sea lady, the history of mr. polly, the food of the gods, the island of dr. moreau. upton sinclair: the jungle, king coal, jimmie higgins, 100 per cent. theodore dreiser: sister carrie. george moore: esther waters. frank norris: the octopus. brand whitlock: the turn of the balance. de foe: robinson crusoe. fielding: tom jones, jonathan wild the great. thackeray: the adventures of barry lyndon. marmaduke pickthall: the adventures of hadji baba. blasco ibanez: the fruit of the vine. frank harris: montes the matador. frederik van eeden: the quest. tolstoi: resurrection.
and now for the people who do not get enough exercise. in the armies of king cyrus it was the law that every man was required to sweat once every twenty-four hours, and that is still the law for every business man and office-worker and writer of books. there is no substitute for it, and there is no health without it. i have heard dr. kellogg say that the modern woman sends out her health with her washing, and i have heard the leisure class ladies at the sanitarium discuss this cryptic utterance and wonder what he meant by it. i know that there is use telling leisure class ladies what exercise at the wash-tub would do for their abdomens and backs. i will only tell them that unless they can find some kind of vigorous activity which keeps them in a free perspiration for an hour or two each day, they will never be really well, and will never bear children without agony and abortion.
for myself, i have found that the minimum is three or four times a week. unless i get that much hard exercise i am soon in trouble. so my advice to the business man is to take off his coat and collar and turn out and help his truck-man; my advice to the white collar slave is to get a part-time job, and dig ditches the rest of the time. to the man who has cares which pursue him, and likewise to the ardent student and brain-worker, i say that they should find, not merely exercise, but play. the distinction between the two things is important. there can be play that is not exercise, for example cards and chess; and, of course, there can be exercise that is not play. what you must have is something that is both play and exercise; something that not merely causes your heart to beat fast, and your lungs to pump fast, and your sweat glands to throw out poisons from your body, but something that fully occupies your mind and gives your higher brain centers a chance to relax.
our civilization has very largely destroyed the possibility of play and the spirit of play. we civilized people no longer know what play is, and regard the desire to play as something abnormal—a form of vice. we allow children to play after school hours, and on saturdays; but for grown-up, serious-minded men and women to want to play would be almost as disreputable as for them to want to get drunk. what could foe more pitiful than the spectacle of tens of thousands of men crowding into our baseball parks and amusement fields to watch other men play for them! imagine, if you can, a crowd of people gathering in a restaurant or theater to watch other people eat for them! imagine yourself a man from mars, coming down to a world with so many people in want, and finding whole classes of men forbidden to do any work, under penalty of disgrace, and compelled, in order to exercise their muscles, to pull on rubber straps and lift weights and wave dumb-bells and indian clubs in the air—methods of expending their muscular energy which are respectable because they accomplish nothing!
when i was a boy, i was fond of all kinds of games. i was a good tennis player, and in the country an incessant hunter and fisherman. when on the city streets we boys could not find any other game to play, we would get up on the roofs of the houses and throw clothes-pins and snow-balls at the "dagoes" working in the nearby excavations; so we had the fine game of being chased by the "dagoes," with the chance, real or imaginary, of having a knife stuck into us. but then, as i grew older, and became aware of the pain and misery of the world, i lost my interest in games, and for ten years or so i never played; i did nothing but study and write. so my health gave way, and i had the problem of restoring it, and i spent some twenty years wrestling with this problem, before i thoroughly convinced myself on the point that there can be no such thing as sound and permanent health without a certain amount of play.
i don't think there is any kind of hard physical work i failed to try, in the course of my experiments. i rode horseback, and took long walks, and climbed mountains, and swam, and dug gardens, and chopped down whole groves of trees and cut them up and carried them to the fireplace. i have done this latter work for a whole winter in the country, several hours every day, and it has done my health no good to speak of; i have been ready for a breakdown at the end of it. the reason is that all the time i was doing these things with my body, i was going right on working my brain. while i was swimming or climbing a mountain or galloping on horseback, i was absorbed in the next chapter of the book i was writing, so that i literally did not know where i was. i would make up my mind that i would not think about my work, and would make desperate efforts not to do so; but it was like walking along the edge of a slippery ditch—sooner or later i was bound to fall in, and go floundering along, unable to get out again!
and the same thing applies to all gymnastic work. i have experimented with a dozen different systems of exercises, and with all kinds of water treatments; i have used dumb-bells and indian clubs and swedish gymnastics, macfadden's exercises in bed, and the yogi breathing exercises, and more kinds of queer things than i can remember now; but for me there is only one solution of the problem, which is to have an antagonist. it may be a deer i am trying to shoot, or some trout i am trying to lure out of their holes; it may be some boys i am trying to beat at football or hockey, or it may be the game i know best and find most convenient, which is tennis. if it is tennis, then it has to be someone who can make me work as hard as i know how; for if it is someone i can beat easily, why, before i have been playing ten minutes, i am busily working out the next chapter of a book, or answering letters i have just got in the mail.
recently i came upon a book, "the psychology of relaxation," by dr. patrick, in which the theory of this is set forth. civilized man is working his higher brain centers more than his body can stand; his brain is running away with him, absorbing a constantly increasing share of his energies. true relaxation is only possible where the higher brain centers are lulled, and the back lobes of the brain brought into activity. one of the means of doing this is alcohol, and that is why through the ages all races of men have craved to get drunk. there is a method which is harmless, and does not break down the system, and that is play. when we become really interested in play, we are as children, or as primitive man; we do all the things that our race used to do many ages ago; we hunt and fight, we pit our wits against the wits of our enemies, and struggle with desperation to get the better of them. if our play is physical play, if we are absorbed in a game or bodily contest, then we are exerting and developing all those portions of us which civilization tends to atrophy and deaden.
there are people who will dispute with you about socialism, and ask, how we are going to provide incentives if we do away with wage slavery. when you tell them that activity is natural to human beings, and that if there were no work, men and women would have to make some, they shake their heads mournfully and tell you about the problem of "human nature." but consider games and sports: men do not have to work their bodies, yet they go out and deliberately hunt for trouble! they invent themselves subtle and complicated games, and are not content until they find people who can beat them at it, or at any rate can make them work to the limit of their strength, until they are in a dripping perspiration and thoroughly exhausted! i may be too optimistic about "human nature," but i believe that this is the attitude every normal human being takes toward the powers, both mental and physical, which he possesses; he wants to use them, and for all they are worth. if you don't believe it, just take any group of youngsters, give them a baseball and bat, turn them loose in a vacant lot, and watch them "choose up sides" and fall to work, screaming and shouting in wild excitement! there are some races of the earth which do not yet know baseball, but the filipinos and the japanese have learned it, and even the war-worn "poilus" and the supercilious "tommies" condescended to experiment with it. and if you think it is only physical competition that young human animals enjoy, try them at putting on a play, or printing a magazine, or conducting a debate, or building a house—anything whatever that involves healthy competition, and is related to the big things of life, but without being for the profit of some exploiter! get clear the plain and simple distinction between work and play: play is what you want to do, while work is what the profit system makes you do!
