In this physical training, there are two points of special importance.  The first is the removal of all unnatural restraints and the pressure of unhealthy customs; the second, is the opportunity, the motive and the habit of free exercise in the pure air of heaven.  These, as causes of health and fine physical development, are interwoven as are their opposites.  In the progress of society from barbarism to refinement, it has often been the case that men, in departing from what was savage, have lost that which was natural; and in their ascent from the rude have left behind that which was essential to the highest civilization.  In escaping from the nakedness of the barbarian, they have sometimes carried dress to an extreme of art which renders it untrue to nature and productive of manifold evils.  In ascending from the simple and rude gastronomy of the savage, they have brought the art of cookery to such an excess of luxury as to enervate society by merely factitious appetites.  In the formation of habits of life, social intercourse and amusements adapted to a refined state, they have introduced many things at war with the healthful development of both body and mind.  The manly exercises of swimming, skating, riding, hunting, ball playing; the bracing walk in storm and sunshine; the free ramble over hill and dale, all adapted to develop an independent, self-relying character; with the occasional reunion where wit, science, healthful industry and serene piety shed their benedictions; associating that which is free and bold with the refined and sacred; all these are, in many cases, displaced by frivolous and less healthful excitements.  Our girls and boys, prematurely exalted into young gentlemen and ladies, are tutored by dancing masters; their manners disciplined into an artificial stiffness; and the free developments of an open nature formed under the genial influence of truly polite parents—­the finest discipline in the world—­arrested by the strictures of a purely conventional regimen, in which the laws of health and the higher spiritual life seem never to have been consulted.

With such a physical training, associated with a corresponding education of the mind and heart, they are ripe for the customs and fashions of life in harmony therewith; and totally averse to the purer, manlier and nobler duties and pleasures of a better state of society.  To dress and exhibit themselves; to crowd the saloon of every foreign trifler, who, under the abused name of art, and for the sake of gold, seeks to minister to us those meretricious excitements which associate themselves with declining states and artificial forms of life; to waste the most precious hours of night, set apart by the God of nature for repose, in dancing, eating, drinking, and revelry, follow naturally enough upon such training.  Then in the rear, come disease of body and mind, broken constitutions and broken hearts; and last of all, with grim majesty, death, prematurely summoned, avenges this violation of the