=Military training.=—­We may shrink away from military training in the schools, just as we shrink from the regime of pugilism; but we may profit by observing both these types of training in our efforts to develop some method of training that will render our young people physically fit.  We need some type of training that will eliminate round and drooping shoulders, weak chests, shambling gait, sluggish circulation, and shallow breathing.  The boys and girls need to be, first of all, healthy animals with large powers of endurance, elastic, buoyant, graceful, and in general well set up.  These conditions constitute the foundation for the superstructure of education.  The placid, anaemic, fiberless child is ill prepared in physique to attain to that mastery of the mental and spiritual world that makes for an approximation to complete living.

=Examples cited.=—­If one will but make a mental appraisement of the first one hundred people he meets, he will see among the number quite a few who reveal a lack of physical vigor.  They droop and slouch along and seem to be dragging their bodies instead of being propelled through space by their bodies.  They can neither stand nor walk as a human being ought to stand and walk, and their entire ensemble is altogether unbeautiful.  We feel instinctively that, being fashioned in the image of their Maker, they have sadly declined from their high estate.  Their bodily attitude seems a sort of apology for life, and we long to invoke the aid of some teacher of physical training to rescue them from themselves and restore them to their rightful heritage.  They are weak, apparently ill-nourished, scrawny, ill-groomed; and we know, without the aid of words, that neither a vigorous mind nor a great spirit would choose that type of body as its habitation.

=The body subject to the mind.=—­A healthy, vigorous, symmetrical body that performs all its functions like a well-articulated, well-adjusted mechanism is the beginning, but only a beginning.  Next comes a mind that is so well trained that it knows what orders to give to the body and how to give them.  Many a strong body enters the door of a saloon because the mind is not sufficiently trained to issue wise orders.  The mind was befuddled before the body became so, and the body becomes so only because the mind commands.  Intoxication, primarily, is a mental apostasy, and the body cannot do otherwise than obey.  If the mind were intent upon securing a book at the library, the body would not have seen the door of the saloon, but would have been urgent to reach the library.  There is neither fiction nor facetiousness in the adage, “An idle brain is the devil’s workshop.”  On the contrary, the saying is crammed full of psychology for the thoughtful observer.  Hence, when we are training the mind we are wreaking destruction upon this workshop.