ted and out of date
to-day. Under the pressure of war we are driven, whether we wish it or
not, to put to immediate test virtually every fact of our daily lives.
We find that almost every machine and well-nigh every method may be
improved--in fact, that it must be improved.

Boats, aeroplanes, guns, industrial processes, even the actual business
of living itself, all are being submitted to the test of emergency and
are being made over upon new lines. So it is with our setting-up
exercises. We can no longer afford to waste time or motion or effort. We
are teaching on an intensive scale and we must take nothing out of a man
in preparation; rather we must add to his store of vitality and energy.
Perhaps we find that the routine of his ordinary work will strengthen
sufficiently his legs and arms. This is astonishingly true. What we must
now do is to supple him, to quicken his co-ordination, to improve his
poise, and to put his trunk and thorax into better shape. We must give
him endurance, quickness of response, and resistive force. This,
therefore, being our problem, we eliminate the arm and leg exercises and
go directly for the trunk and thorax. We must quicken co-ordination and
improve the man's rapidity of response to command. And standing out
above all is this major principle: "No vitality should be taken out of a
man by these setting-up exercises; he should not be tired out, but
rather made ready for the regular work of the day."

OUT-OF-DATE IDEAS

This war in which we are engaged has brought to our people some
all-compelling truths. And the greatest of these is that our men, the
flower of our racial stock, are deficient physically when put to the
test before examining-boards. When one sees some two thousand men
examined by draft boards to secure two hundred men for our army, as
happened in some cases, when one reads that in a physical examination
for the sanitary police force in Cleveland thirty-seven out of
forty-two women passed and only twenty-two men out of seventy-two, one
is ready indeed to believe that we have failed to produce men who can be
called upon when the need arises to defend our country.

[Illustration: INCORRECT POSITION, SHOWING HOW MOST MEN SLACK IN SWEDISH
EXERCISES BY LETTING THE BACK BEND]

Our athletic sports have produced the right spirit, as the rush of
athletes to the service has shown. But our calisthenics, our general
building-up exercises have apparently failed in the physical de