Why take the punishment? Why, primarily, say the pugs, to the end that one may take care of oneself in case one is thuggishly assaulted; and secondarily, to engage at forms of exercise that conserve longevity.
Concerning the primary proposition, say as to how many times in your adult life you have been obliged to put up your fists in self defense? And as to the secondary contention, recollect that any form of strenuous exercise habitually taken on after the plastic period, results practically in a stretching of the muscles and tissues, and a feeding of them so stretched. Thereafter, the like of the form of exercise with the feeding, must be continued for years, and gradually graded down to some past middle age, else both muscles and tissues will go flabby under wrinkling flesh, and “Doc” must do the best he can in the case.
As an example of how the thing works out take this: the grand majority of ex-college athletes slough off too soon on the following-up process named. Hence, though they represent the physical cream of colleges, they do not stand out in life insurance statistics as by natural right they would, had they exercised and trained to Nature’s bidding, instead of to the snap of the professional’s whip; nay, had they not trained at all for heart-exhausting competition, and had just breezed along the countryside, agreeably with the modest demands of the muscular reflexes.
Lads are subject these days to all kinds of sporting flim-flam, not the least pernicious of which is that they must be banged about the lot in order to win physical standing.
Under stress of wholesouled play, pure sport will pass betimes the line that divides the gentleman-athlete and the instinctively brutal battering ram. It is good that some have a bit of grit ground into them. Sport must ride lads to a degree, else be robbed of enthusiasm that makes for wholesome results; but the moment the thuggish “professional” promoter promotes, bid farewell to the finer sensibilities and to the purposes to which pure sport and sporting should be held for lads.
When, as at present, it comes to the point where habitual parasites of the “pug” variety are held up to the youth of the land by governmental honorables, as exemplars of all a lad should be and strive for, it is time to call check; and if the grossly overdone sporting proclivities of men do not strike in, perhaps the fact that the women of the “honorables” also stand sponsor for first-driving drones, will do so.
Looking at the matter in the large, what is it if not morally criminal to babble in one breath about “disarmament,” and in the next breath imbue lads and lassies with the ideals of the shouldering hog, and the instincts of the boss bull? Where else than in the moral gutter should a nation expect to land, which goes out of its way to heroize thinly veneered parasites, and plays up to out and out cheats of the same breed?
The American people have their work cut out to arrest that for which they have bidden, put up, put down, and put through; which is to say: to snap social handcuffs on those who advisedly prey upon the weak crotchets and vicious curves of their kind. Adding to the germane tens of thousands of flouted laws wont do it; nor will anything short of a purging of the social conscience. Moreover, the purging will begin necessarily at the mother’s knee, and extend through the plastic years.
America heads for the shallows because she took on the impossible task of making over habit-marked grown-ups, bidden to her bosom from the scrap heaps of nations. Now, she may tack quickly or take her medicine, prescribed by past masters at brute-struck quackery.
So, without end, we might specify and elaborate. The crucial point is that the public sees capital menace to the public safety only in the acts of the crassest of felonious offenders: whereas much more of fateful consequence resides in the morally unclean machinations of those who practically shove human pawns to the first lines of criminal attack.