Dr. George J. Fisher, international secretary of the Physical Department of the Young Men's Christian Association, says, "An unfortunately large number of our population haven't the physical basis for being good." No one with even the slightest knowledge of sociology and criminology will be disposed to deny such a statement. One might as well expect a one-legged man to win the international Marathon as to expect certain physical delinquents to "go right." Thousands of boys and girls sit in our public schools today who are the unhappy candidates for this delinquency, and we are monotonously striving to get something into their minds, which would largely take care of their own development, if only we had the wisdom to address ourselves to their bodies.
There is indeed not only a physical basis of being good, but, what is not less important, a physical basis of doing good. Many people avoid blame and disgrace who fail utterly in making a positive contribution to the welfare of the community. They do not market their mental goods. Thousands of men remain in mediocrity, to the great loss of society, simply because they have not the requisite physical outfit to force their good ideas, impulses, and visions into the current of the world's life. For the most part they lack the great play qualities, "enthusiasm, spontaneity, creative ability, and the ability to co-operate." Whenever we build up a strong human organism we lay the physical foundations of efficiency, and one is inclined to go farther and think with Dr. Fisher, that muscular energy itself is capable of transformation into energy of mind and will. That is to say that play not only helps greatly in building the necessary vehicle, but that it creates a fund upon which the owner may draw for the accomplishment of every task.
There is ground also for the contention that grace of physical development easily passes over into manner and mind. The proper development of the instrument, the right adjustment and co-ordination of the muscular outfit through which the emotions assemble and diffuse themselves, is, when other things are equal, a guaranty of inner beauty and the grace of true gentility. A poor instrument is always vexatious, a good instrument is an abiding joy. The good body helps to make the gracious self. Other things being equal the strong body obeys, but the weak body rules.
One should not overlook the heartiness that is engendered in games, the total engagement of mind and body that insures for the future the ability "to be a whole man to one thing at a time." Much of the moral confusion of life arises from divided personality, and the miserable application of something less than the entire self to the problem in hand. Do not the great religious leaders of the world agree with the men of practical efficiency in demonstrating and requiring this hearty release of the total self in the proposed line of action? The demand of Jesus, touching love of God and neighbor, or regarding enlistment in His cause, is a demand for prompt action of the total self. Possibly no other single virtue has a more varied field of application than the ability for decisive and whole-souled action, which is constantly cultivated in all physical training, and especially in competitive athletic games.
It should be noted also that the hearty release of energy is, in every good game, required to keep within the rules. This is particularly true in basket-ball, which takes high rank as an indoor game for boys. While the game is intense and fatiguing, anything like a muscular rampage brings certain penalty to the player and loss to his team. So that, while the boy who does not play "snappy" and hard cannot rank high, neither can the boy who plays "rough-house." Forcefulness under control is the desideratum.
Besides this there is always the development of that good-natured appreciation of every hard task, that refinement of the true sporting spirit, by which all the serious work of life becomes a contest worthy of never-ending interest and buoyant persistency. In the midst of all the sublime responsibilities of his remarkable ministry we hear Phillips Brooks exclaim, "It's great fun to be a minister." An epoch-making president of the United States telegraphs his colleague and successor, with all the zest of a boy at play, "We've beaten them to a frazzle"; and the greatest of all apostles, triumphing over bonds and imprisonment, calls out to his followers, "I have fought a good fight." "It is doubtful if a great man ever accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in it."
The saving power of organized play, in the prevention and cure of that morbidity which especially besets youth, can hardly be overestimated. This diseased self-consciousness is intimately connected with nervous tensions and reflexes from sex conditions and not infrequently passes over into sex abuse or excess of some sort. So that the diversion of strenuous athletic games, and the consequent use of energy up to a point just below exhaustion, is everywhere recognized as an indispensable moral prophylactic. Solitariness, overwrought nervous states, the intense and suggestive stimuli of city life, call for a large measure of this wholesome treatment for the preservation of the moral integrity of the boy, his proper self-respect, and those ideals of physical development which will surely make all forms of self-abuse or indulgence far less likely.
The normal exhilaration of athletic games, which cannot be described to those without experience, is often what is blindly and injuriously sought by the young cigarette smoker in the realm of nervous excitation without the proper motor accompaniments. Possibly if we had not so restricted our school-yards and overlooked the necessity for a physical trainer and organized play, we would not have schools in which as many as 80 per cent of the boys between ten and seventeen years of age are addicted to cigarettes. In trying to fool Nature in this way the boy pays a heavy penalty in the loss of that very decisiveness, force, and ability in mind and body which properly accompany athletic recreation. The increased circulation and oxidization of the blood is in itself a great tonic and when one reflects that, with a running pace of six miles an hour the inhalation of air increases from four hundred and eighty cubic inches per minute to three thousand three hundred and sixty cubic inches, the tonic effect of the athletic game will be better appreciated. This increased use of oxygen means healthy stimulation, growth of lung capacity, and exaltation of spirit without enervation. "Health comes in through the muscles but flies out through the nerves."
It was well thought and arranged by the ancients [says Martin Luther] that young people should exercise themselves and have something creditable and useful to do. Therefore I like these two exercises and amusements best, namely, music and chivalrous games or bodily exercises, as fencing, wrestling, running, leaping, and others..... With such bodily exercises one does not fall into carousing, gambling, and hard drinking, and other kinds of lawlessness, as are unfortunately seen now in the towns and at the courts. This evil comes to pass if such honest exercises and chivalrous games are despised and neglected.
