Never in my entire professional life have I been so depressed by discordant voices as during this sixty-day fast just ended. All the air has been charged, darkened with frownings—even threats of what would happen in case of death; and as never before has this question come to me, "Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine vain things?"
Again I must tell you that the No-breakfast Plan, the plan not to eat in time of health until there are a normal need and desire for food, that are only developed after several hours of morning labor, and not to eat at all during acute sickness, is the easiest of all means to maintain health, and to regain it when lost. In my message I have had the greatest good for the greatest number of the world's busy people, who have no time to indulge abnormal, artificial ways in the recovery and maintenance of health—ways that are a real tax on time and taxing in the means involved. Passing few are they of the world's workers who have the time for all this, and especially they who are the slaves of the kitchen.
Again I must suggest to you that the actual need of daily food as a matter to meet the actual daily need is a new question in practical physiology. It may be very much less than is supposed, a matter to be determined by the scales. There are none who can eat at all with relish who are not more governed by relish than the hunger sense, as to the amount of food eaten. The real amount of daily food needed may be so small that enough of nourishment can be extracted from almost any of the easiest available foods, the main question being one of slow eating, restful eating, and with the most thorough mastication. For those who have the leisure and tastes for study over what to eat there are the works of Haig, Hoy, Hensel, Sir Henry Thompson, and others, that may be read with both interest and profit.
And now I address my last words to the mothers of the land. For you the No-breakfast Plan means the highest possible health, the greatest possible relief from the slavery of toil. On no other plan are there such promises of relief and prevention of all your sex ailings. On this plan only can you become man's equal in the hours of leisure that are his by a feeling of divine right; you also should consider the possibilities of a day of eight or ten hours as needing the reduction all the more because of your weaker bodies.
The No-breakfast Plan means for your children the best possibilities for the conservation of all the higher instincts and powers that will tend to save them from the saloon, the prison, the electric chair. If the Garden of Eden was abolished because you enticed man to eat the wrong food, it is for you to restore a new race of Adams in all the ways of health, of such health as will make the entire earth a "Paradise regained."
Readers, lay and professional, let me reiterate in my parting words, words at white heat with conviction as to their soundness and utility. Enforced food is a danger always to be measured by the gravity of the local or general disease; a danger always to be measured also by the feebleness of old age—by feebleness no matter how caused.
This physiological righteousness will remain unquestioned, its practicality unsurpassed, while man remains on the earth to violate the laws of his Creator manifest in his own body. The penalties of disobedience are as certain as that every cause is followed by a definite effect. There are no remissions in the various antitoxins; there is no hope for you through hollow needles. Nature is exacting, but she is merciful. Obey her laws that your ways may be toward Paradise, and not away from it.