A MORAL QUESTION
An eminent authority on the physiology of the vocal organs, Dr. Lennox Browne, remarks (in Voice, Song, and Speech), that “respiratory exercises, and subsequently lessons in reading, reciting, and singing, are oftentimes of the greatest use in strengthening a weak chest; and, indeed, it is not too much to say, in arresting consumption.” Another excellent authority, Mr. A. B. Bach, points out (in his Musical Education and Vocal Culture, which should be consulted by all who wish to learn the art of Deep Breathing) that “very few vocalists die of consumption,” owing to the fact that they properly exercise their lungs and chests.
This brings us face to face with a moral question of enormous importance, to which writers on ethics have by no means as yet given the attention it loudly clamours for. Consumption, we read, “is a disease of great frequency and severity, which, in the civilised nations of Europe, produces from one-sixth to one-tenth of the total mortality, in ordinary times.” Now if, as we have just seen, consumption can be arrested and cured by proper exercise of the lungs and chest in pure air, does it not follow that the neglect of such exercises makes certain parties criminally responsible for the greater number of deaths from consumption? It is “proved by careful inquiries that the workshops of tailors, printers, and other businesses carried on in close, ill-ventilated apartments, by large numbers of workmen, are, in a very aggravated sense, nurseries of consumption. Cotton and linen factories have also been shown, when ill-regulated, to be largely responsible for the death of their inmates from this disease.”
Why should not the owners of factories who refuse to ventilate their buildings be held responsible for the ill-health, the early decrepitude and death of many of the workers, and the workers’ weakly, consumptive children who die young? As England alone has over three hundred thousand women engaged in cotton manufacture, the amount of ill-health, early senility, ugliness, consumption, etc., bred by criminal neglect of hygienic precautions, is appalling to the imagination. A case was mentioned in the American papers a few years ago, where the windows in a factory were nailed fast to prevent the poor, suffocating girls from opening them. And, strange to say, the owner of that factory was not immediately lynched. Surely, if ever a monster deserved to be hanged to the nearest tree, it was the man who ordered those windows to be nailed down.
But factory owners are by no means the only persons who are thus responsible for indirect manslaughter by foul-air poisoning. Thousands of loving mothers and fathers blaspheme their Creator in attributing the early death of their children to a “dispensation of Providence,” when the plain truth, brutally expressed, is that they killed them with the poisoned air, indigestible food, and insufficient exercise that brought on the fatal consumption. To say that the disease was hereditary is only to shift the hygienic crime on the shoulders of the grand-parents.
In human courts of justice ignorance of the law is not considered an excuse for the commission of crime. If the same principle holds true in some future world where human actions will be judged, what terrible indictments will be brought against some parents for crimes committed against the health and life of their children and grandchildren, for neglecting to learn the laws of health, as laid down in physiological and hygienic textbooks!
Inasmuch as Personal Beauty is the flower and symbol of perfect Health, it might be shown, by following out this argument, that ugliness is a sin, and man’s first duty the cultivation of Beauty.