CHAPTER V.
REWARDS AND PENALTIES.
The health-seeker.
Some people expect health, as others expect riches, to fall into their lap. Either because they do not know, or do not care, they prefer to leave their health to look after itself. They call it trusting to Nature. And when they see other people studying the best way to be strong and well, they call them cranks and faddists.
There is a vast difference, however, between the faddist and the genuine health-seeker. The individual who thinks the world is going to be saved by eating brown bread or any other article of diet, regardless of the fact that what agrees with one may upset another, is nothing short of a nuisance. The man who strives to exercise his common sense, and to find out what suits him, either from his own experience or from the advice of those in a position to give him useful information, is worthy of all respect.
It is all very well to talk of leaving things to Nature, but does Nature always do her work in the best possible way?
Leave a garden to Nature for a year, and you will have a clear answer to that question. It will be overgrown with weeds. Leave a tract of country to Nature, and it becomes a wilderness. Leave your health to Nature, and it will be nothing short of a miracle if she does not make a mess of it.
Talk to any elderly man, who has succeeded in keeping himself fit and strong, and almost certainly you will find that he has well-defined ideas on the maintenance of health. He has found out what agrees with him and what does not. Sometimes he appears to be careless as to what he eats, taking things that would disagree with many other persons. Yet he is only taking them because he has discovered that they suit his constitution. Moreover, you will notice, if you watch him closely, that he is extremely particular as to the way in which he eats that food and all his other food as well. A man is either a physician or a fool at forty, it is said. The worst of it is that by the time most of us have reached that age we have managed to inflict more harm than can be undone.
Nowadays nearly everything is taught in the schools, including perhaps a few subjects that might well be spared. When the teaching of health is made compulsory, we shall make rapid strides in regard to national physique. The medical inspection of schools was one of the greatest advances ever made. And when in addition every child is instructed in the elementary rules of health, the country will be spared a vast amount of time and money, such as is expended at present in looking after the feeble and diseased. We do not expect a boy or girl to learn any other subject on its own account or of its own freewill, and we have no right to expect them to learn the secrets of health. They must be taught them just as they are taught to read and write. Above all, they must have it impressed upon them that health is largely a matter of care and study.
The reward of care.
The reason why some people are stronger than others is, in the great majority of cases, because they have taken care of themselves, rather than because they have inherited more robust frames and greater staying powers. There are some, it is true, who have to struggle against ill-health from their earliest childhood. All through life, it may be, they have to contend against their own infirmities.