VALUE OF DR. TANNER’S EXPERIMENT.
This is not to be found in the fact that after all a man must eat or die; this we more than suspected before the Doctor’s experiment; neither has he settled how long a man may do without food; but he has shown conclusively that starvation, as a mode of living, is not economical, and that a life thus sustained is not worth anything. It cost a great deal to keep him alive, and the utmost he could do was to be driven out for a daily airing.
This lesson constitutes the sole value of his elaborate and painful experiment: A man who is to do anything must be properly nourished; plenty of good, wholesome food is cheaper than a diet of ice-water.
Good friends, we need not repeat the Doctor’s experiment to prove that the policy of starvation is a mistaken policy, and is every way expensive and hurtful. The question is not how long can a life be sustained at the point of starvation, which is also the point of utter worthlessness, but how much can a life properly nourished be made to accomplish?
Our parable needs no explanation. Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars is the least sum that should be named as at all adequate to the highest efficiency of our school and church work. We can live on less, but by so much as we fall short of this by so much are we hampered and crippled.
The work we have to do is a work that must be done, and we, the churches of the country, have it to do. It becomes, of course, a question of wise economy in the expenditure of means. We point again to the lesson taught us and reiterate it: Starvation is not economy! The condition of greatest efficiency is that of abundant life blood; and for the work of the A. M. A. for 1881, this means at least three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.