It is advisable for elderly people to use it more or less continuously throughout life, for with advancing years the bowels naturally become less active, and this simple process offers a valuable means of assistance to flagging nature at the cost of little, if any, exertion; in fact, after a little experience no more will be thought of using the “Cascade” than of taking a meal.
I would strictly impress on the minds of those who propose to give this treatment a trial that, like every other undertaking in life, thoroughness and persistence are absolutely indispensable to success. No great end was ever yet achieved except by hard work, conscientiousness and perseverance, and these three factors are in the highest degree necessary to restore health to a system from which it has long been estranged.
If a chronic, deep-seated disease can be cured in a year, by a home process, so simple that a child can understand and practise it, the individual so benefited should consider himself or herself most fortunate; and few will deny that the end in view—restoration to health—is a full and ample recompense for the thorough and persistent effort necessary to attain it. If it were a question of large pecuniary profit to the patient, it is scarcely necessary to say that every nerve would be strained to its utmost tension to bring the coveted prize within his grasp; yet here the reward is of infinitely greater value, a prize compared with which riches are as dross in comparison with gold. It is Health, without which the acquisition of Wealth, is well-nigh impossible, and its possession as profitless to the possessor as Dead Sea fruit.
I write thus strongly on this point because there is a large class of people who dabble in every new system of treatment projected, and toy with every medicinal device that is placed upon the market. They are the class from whom the patent medicine vendor draws his enormous annual profits. Like a bee in a garden of roses, they flit from one remedy to another, but, unlike that energetic and acquisitive insect, they do not gather the golden reward they are in search of—health. It is the purveyor of the nostrum that secures whatever there is of gold.
They seem to be utterly incapable of continuity of effort, and, unless they can discern a marked improvement within a week after commencing a fresh method of treatment, get discouraged and abandon it. To this class of people I say, in the most emphatic manner, that if they propose to give this great remedial process a trial and expect to derive benefit from it, that the cure rests entirely in their own hands.
They must persevere. They must be thorough. They must not expect miraculous results in a few days. Their diseased condition is the growth of months, perhaps years, and it is the height of unreasoning folly to expect to be cured in a few weeks. A merchant whose business has been crippled and who starts in to rebuild it, will consider himself an extremely fortunate man if, by watchful and untiring endeavor, he can restore it to a sound and healthy condition in a few years. Growth is necessarily slow—and this is especially the case with the human system. Nature will not be hurried. But of one thing they may rest assured, and that is that if they conscientiously and persistently practise this simple hygienic treatment they will find Nature a responsive and willing coadjutor.
“Heaven fights on the side of the strongest battalions,” is a military aphorism, and Nature ranges herself on the side of the individual who co-operates with her most faithfully, who, in the struggle for the regaining of health, brings the greatest amount of determination and perseverence to the encounter.