Finally, exercise in company with others is more entertaining and likely to be then done both better and more beneficially than exercise practised alone, and it is with this among other objects that we have advocated in the chapter on Mind and Morals the formation of city clubs where both practice-exercises like those given above could be done in classes, and also such games as squash, badminton, fives, and covered tennis be played. In the separate volumes which deal with individual games will be found special practice-exercises for those games, some of which can take the place of the general exercises given above, since they exercise the same muscles, but in a way more directly adapted for the games in question.
CHAPTER IV.
DIET AND STIMULANTS.
Dogmatism on any subject is dangerous: in matters of food it is fatal. One man’s meat is literally another man’s poison, and because one of the writers knows that personally he can digest without the slightest discomfort a heavy supper, sleep the sleep of the just, and rise cheerful and hungry for breakfast, he would be making a great mistake in recommending such a course for a dyspeptic person, with a view to the strengthening of his digestive processes. In fact, if a naturally dyspeptic person persevered in such a system, this unfortunate scribe would probably be summoned to attend—with shame and dishonour—a coroner’s inquest. On the other hand, should the dyspeptic so far win him over as to make him give what he would call a “fair trial” to a simple diet, “the only diet” he would say “on which it is possible to keep fairly well,” he would, if it was persevered with, be probably asked in a public place what he knew about this suicide. But the moral of these gloomy reflections is clear enough: namely, that in questions of eating and drinking and smoking, what is to be ascertained is the diet which will keep A or B in good health for the proper performance of a citizen’s duties. Whatever diet (or absence of diet) continues to give good results after a protracted trial is almost certainly good for the individual in question. Whether it would be good for another individual it is impossible to say, but if any one person, even though he lived exclusively on green cigars and Egyptian mummies, continued to be in his most excellent health on such a diet, it would be foolish to urge him, except on the score of expense in the way of import duties, to change it.
But the majority of people are not at their best, and know it. When they are in hard work which, as far as we can see in the present highly competitive state of the world, is becoming the normal condition for man, their bodily health, and in particular their bodily activity, sensibly declines. Then perhaps there comes a lull, and they rush off into the country to be out of doors all day, and play games, or shoot or hunt, and get sensibly better. They have more appetite for food, and as a natural consequence digest it better, since wholesome appetite is a fair enough sign-post pointing to the pleasant place called “Eat.” Then the lull ceases; they go back to work again, with a gradual decline of appetite. At these cross-roads, so to speak, for the most part they take the wrong turning, and continue to eat much as before. Horrors ensue.
The fact is that most people when taking a great deal of exercise are able to digest, and, what is not less important, to assimilate, not only larger quantities of food than they can assimilate when in full sedentary work, but a different sort of food. As a rule they know of only one change of diet, alluded to contemptuously as “Vegetarianism,” and connected in their minds with huge platefuls of damp cabbage, of which the most valuable salts have been boiled out and thrown away by an ignorant cook. They are further “put off” by what appears to most people preposterous notions about the sin, no less, of eating animal food. In fact, bad cooking and tactless enthusiasm have hand in hand done their utmost to ruin the vegetarian cause. To eat damp cabbage can be, by no conceivable process, good for anybody, and to shun animal food because it implies death to an animal is a motive which does not appeal to the majority, who, without examining any possible truth it may contain, label it a fad. And there is nothing which in the minds of ordinary people, who most naturally and sensibly do not wish to spend the whole of their lives in discovering the diet which best suits them, is more strongly prejudicial to any examination of a new system than to suspect it of being faddy. They naturally desire a régime of which the common-sense appeals to them, and the common-sense of that which is ordinarily called vegetarianism is far to seek. Many people have found that the amount of meat which they usually eat is not very good for them: that three flesh meals a day are excessive in the way of animal food; on the other hand they must have something substituted for the meat, and they turn to vegetarianism, and perhaps try a meal at some vegetarian eating-house. One of the present writers tried it. For an hour or rather less he felt that he would never eat again as long as he lived, then, almost without transition, he felt that he wished to eat the whole world round. And he fled back to the fleshpots of Egypt.
But nowadays vegetarianism is studied by certain people in a spirit of scientific investigation, and its results, rationally arrived at, are likely to prove of the most permanent value. It is the greatest possible mistake to suppose that all vegetables and fruits are equally supporting; some are highly nutritious, others are hardly nutritious at all, and to load the stomach with immense masses of a food which has a low nutritious value, in order to get sufficient nutriment, will probably produce results on health worse even than those from which the man who found that he was taking excessive quantities of animal food tried to escape.[4]
Briefly, then, the scientific view of food in general is as follows.
Food has to supply waste of tissue and make repairs.
Food has to supply heat (fuel for the continual combustion of the body) and a certain amount of fat.
Food—so it is usually asserted and largely believed—has to give the stomach a certain amount of fibrous matter to supply bulk which will enable the system, by natural means, to cleanse and flush itself internally, and throw off the waste for which it has no use, but which exists in greater or smaller quantities in all foods.