For young men in cities, too, the facilities for exercise are limited not only by money, but by time.  They must commonly take it after dark.  It is every way a blessing, when the gymnasium divides their evenings with the concert, the book, or the public meeting.  Then there is no time left, and small temptation, for pleasures less pure.  It gives an innocent answer to that first demand for evening excitement which perils the soul of the homeless boy in the seductive city.  The companions whom he meets at the gymnasium are not the ones whose pursuits of later nocturnal hours entice him to sin.  The honest fatigue of his exercises calls for honest rest.  It is the nervous exhaustion of a sedentary, frivolous, or joyless life which madly tries to restore itself by the other nervous exhaustion of debauchery.  It is an old prescription,—­

  “Multa tulit fecitque puer, sudavit et alsit,
  Abstinuit venere et vino.”

There is another class of critics whose cant is simply can’t, and who, being unable or unwilling to surrender themselves to these simple sources of enjoyment, are grandiloquent upon the dignity of manhood, and the absurdity of full-grown men in playing monkey-tricks with their bodies.  Full-grown men?  There is not a person in the world who can afford to be a “full-grown man” through all the twenty-four hours.  There is not one who does not need, more than he needs his dinner, to have habitually one hour in the day when he throws himself with boyish eagerness into interests as simple as those of boys.  No church or state, no science or art, can feed us all the time; some morsels there must be of simpler diet, some moments of unadulterated play.  But dignity?  Alas for that poor soul whose dignity must be “preserved,”—­preserved in the right culinary sense, as fruits which are growing dubious in their natural state are sealed up in jars to make their acidity presentable!  “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned,” and degradation in the dignity that has to be preserved.  Simplicity is the only dignity.  If one has not the genuine article, no affluence of starch, no snow-drift of white-linen decency, will furnish any substitute.  If one has it, he will retain it, whether he stand on his head or his heels.  Nothing is really undignified but affectation or conceit; and for the total extinction and annihilation of every vestige of these, there are few things so effectual as athletic exercises.

Still another objection is that of the medical men, that the gymnasium, as commonly used, is not a specific prescription for the special disease of the patient.  But setting aside the claims of the system of applied gymnastics, which Ling and his followers have so elaborated, it is enough to answer, that the one great fundamental disorder of all Americans is simply nervous exhaustion, and that for this the gymnasium can never be misdirected, though it may be used to excess.  Of course one can no more cure over-work of brain by over-work of