side, it is perfectly natural that you should strive to bring up a
worthy family of attractive young animals. And let us pause upon this.

If the idea which, even at its best, would be so deplorably imperfect,
were rationally carried out, still it would not be so absolutely
pestilent and debasing as it is. Physical education, rightly practiced,
is a fine and indispensable process in right living. If the system had
for its end the rearing of really robust and healthy creatures, it would
mean something. On the contrary, however, anybody who makes a tour
through fashionable rooms in the season may see that, in a vast quantity
of cases, the heroines of the night are just as sorrily off in bodily
stamina as they are for intellectual ideas and interests. Here we again
encounter the fundamental blunder, that it is only the outside about
which we need concern ourselves. Let a woman be well dressed (or
judiciously undressed), have bright eyes, a whitish skin, rounded
outlines, and that suffices. All this a wise English mother will
certainly secure, just as a wise Chinese woman will take care to have
tiny feet, plucked eyebrows, and black finger-nails.

If you go into a nursery you will see the process already at work. The
little girl, who would fain exercise her young limbs by manifold rude
sprawlings and rushing hither and thither, and single combats with her
brothers, is tricked out in ribbons and gay frocks, and bid sit still in
solemn decorum. With every year of her growth this principle of
attention to outside trickeries and fineries is more rigidly pursued.
Less and less every year are the nerves and muscles, the restless
activities of arms and legs, exercised and made to purvey new vigor to
the life. The blood is allowed to grow stagnant. The life of the woman,
even as mere animal, becomes poor and morbid and artificial. By dint of
much attention and many devices, the outside of the body is maintained
comely in the eyes of people whose notions of comeliness are thoroughly
artificial and sophisticated. But how can there be any health with high
eating, little exercise, above all, with the mind left absolutely vacant
of all interests? The Belgravian mother does not even understand the
miserable trade she has chosen. She is as poor a physical trainer as she
is poor morally and intellectually.

The truth is that in a human being, even from the physical point of
view, it is rather a dangerous thing to ignore the intellect an