form from the chemical elements of the atmosphere, pepsinated or half-digested in advance, and sucked up through a glass tube from a tin can, what need shall we have of teeth, or stomachs even?  They may go, along with our muscles and our physical courage, while, challenging ever more and more our proper admiration, will grow the gigantic domes of our crania, arching over our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible little lips to those floods of learned and ingenious talk which will constitute our most congenial occupation.

I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apocalyptic vision.  Mine certainly did so; and I cannot believe that our muscular vigor will ever be a superfluity.  Even if the day ever dawns in which it will not be needed for fighting the old heavy battles against Nature, it will still always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, serenity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elasticity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored and easy of approach.  Weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call irritable weakness.  And that blessed internal peace and confidence, that acquiescentia in seipso, as Spinoza used to call it, that wells up from every part of the body of a muscularly well-trained human being, and soaks the indwelling soul of him with satisfaction, is, quite apart from every consideration of its mechanical utility, an element of spiritual hygiene of supreme significance.

And now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene, and try to enlist your insight and sympathy in a cause which I believe is one of paramount patriotic importance to us Yankees.  Many years ago a Scottish medical man, Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we should call an asylum physician (the most eminent one in Scotland), visited this country, and said something that has remained in my memory ever since.  “You Americans,” he said, “wear too much expression on your faces.  You are living like an army with all its reserves engaged in action.  The duller countenances of the British population betoken a better scheme of life.  They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon, if any occasion should arise that requires it.  This inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used, I regard,” continued Dr. Clouston, “as the great safeguard of our British people.  The other thing in you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought somehow to tone yourselves down.  You really do carry too much expression, you take too intensely the trivial moments of life.”